Service Learning Reflection

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  Field Experience Service Learning Project  

1. Provide demographics of school, number of students in class and who your cooperating teacher is. Ridgeline Elementary School is located in Highland, Utah. The economic living conditions within the school boundaries range from upper to average income levels. There are 790 students total in grades K-6 including a preschool.  Mrs. McCracken’s 6th grade class, in which we were assigned to, is made up of 32 students, 20 girls and 12 boys. The students range in age from 11 to 12 years old. One student is Asian, another Philippino, and the other 30 are Caucasian. The achievement levels are generally at grade level in math and reading.  Students in the class seem eager to learn and are well behaved.

2. How is your relationship with your cooperating teacher? Explain.                Our relationship with Mrs. McCracken was very friendly and professional.  We had an open dialogue and effective communication from the very beginning.  She was very good about giving compliments as well as constructive criticism regarding our lessons.  We found it very helpful to discuss each lesson with her after completion.  Most often the advice she gave us was very helpful and appreciated.  She knows her students better than we do and would give us advice on how to integrate our teaching techniques in order to better accommodate specific individual student needs, as well as advice relating to her past teaching experiences she has had that would help us in our future teaching opportunities.
3. How does he/she feel about the technology piece you created?        Mrs. McCracken liked our digital story. She felt it was very affective with her class and appropriate for the grade level.  We think that it was fun for her because she doesn’t use much technology in her classroom. As a long time teacher she has most of her routines nailed down and doesn’t seem to want to change things up as much. Unfortunately, technology implementation is seen more as a burden than a benefit to her at her career level.
4. How does he/she feel about the lesson you completed?          The lesson we taught incorporating  the digital story about tombs, pyramids, and the afterlife of Ancient Egypt went very well.  Mrs. McCracken said that she enjoyed it and felt that we had done a wonderful job of keeping the students engaged with the material.  We had to extend it into a second day because the they were so full of questions and comments. She said that is a good sign that their brains are turned on and they are in learning mode.
5. How did the the training session go? Explain.                Mrs. McCracken didn’t have much interest in learning how to make a digital story.  She said she uses more traditional means of teaching in her classroom because she doesn’t have time to create customized technology for her lessons. The Principal has standards that he sets for the school and although the school is equipped with advanced technology in most places, the teachers feel a lot of pressure from him to keep test scores up, so rather than spend time creating new technology themselves they rely on what’s already available.  At the time of our instruction the 6th grade was putting on a play at the request of the principal. It was a high pressure time for all the teachers. This possibly made them feel even less inspired by the idea of implementing digital stories into their already overwhelmed schedule.
6. How do you feel about this service-learning experience?        Because of the particularly stressful time and busy schedule of the play Mrs. McCracken seemed a little flustered with technology and didn’t want much advice on changing things in her classroom or learning how to make and use digital stories.   We were therefore not afforded the opportunity to implement the service-learning experience.  
7. What did your cooperating teacher gain from the experience?   Because Mrs. McCracken was able to experience the success of our digital story with her students, we hope that she will be more open in the future to learning how to make digital stories and implement  them into her classroom.
8. What did you gain from the experience?    It was a good experience to see how well the students enjoyed the digital story and how it enhanced our lesson.  Using our digital story to introduce the highlights of our lesson and foreshadow what they were going to learn was exciting for the students.  We did have issues with the combination of the speakers and our computer making the audio a little difficult to hear, but it didn’t even seem to phase the students.  We were able to learn a lot from using it with students and observing them engage with it than we could have otherwise.   
9. Was it worth it?  Why or why not?   In the beginning when we were spending so much time researching and creating our story, we weren’t sure it would be worth the effort. But with how well the students liked it, we realized it‘s something we would like to use in our classrooms and keep for years of reuse. It’s always a good thing to add variety to a classroom and change things up in order to keep student interest. However, because of the time it took to make a digital story we would want lobby for other teachers to implement them as well so that we could share.  With the forecasted busy schedule we will all have, it would save a lot of time and still give the same benefits to the students.