Jessica Crownover Video Reflection October 1, 2012

My first placement was a first grade class made up of twenty-one six- and seven-yearolds. Of these twenty-one students, two of them have IEPs that are practically on kindergarten standards; they are only expected to be able to blend three-letter words by May. Three other students are repeating the first-grade. There are also a few students in the class that displayed consistent problem behavior; I did my best to accommodate and preemptively prevent. Most of the rest of the class was wiggly and fidgety, which I completely understand with the length of the lesson. The class is divided by ability level rather than in mixed ability levels. That being said, those that were considered the high group were completely separated from the rest of the class. The two students with IEPs were seated in the very front of the low and middle groups; they were often causing distractions for their table group. I feel that their seating arrangement of somewhat segregating students by their ability level only caused more off-task behavior. During a large portion of the lesson, the lights were off because of the projector. Even when the lights are on, the room is rather dim due to the dark blue draping at the lights. The lesson that I recorded was day two of a weeklong basal reader story. This included reviewing spelling words, amazing words, phonics, and high-frequency words. At this point, my reading lessons were in one large chunk of time for whole-group, followed by small-group work. This particular lesson focused on the s plural ending on words and the concept of nonfiction text. The entire morning is dedicated to reading; from eight in the morning until about ten in the morning is set aside for the Scott Foresman reading lesson. One of the things I would like to address in this reflection is my demeanor with the students. This is also something that I have tried to work on since my first formal observation. I

feel like I was entirely too concerned with being considered mean by my students; since my teacher was proud to admit that she was considered the mean teacher, I did not want to be like her. I didnt want them to feel like I was mean, so I tried to not raise my voice with them and I tried as best I could not to scold them. What I didnt realize, unfortunately, was how ineffective it was. By my trying to be the nice guy, I completely neglected setting myself up as an authority figure. Sure, they understood that I was a teacher and I was able to reprimand their poor choices, but I somehow let them have the authority over me. I dont think I quite realized that telling students their clips were moving down on the behavior chart in a tone that was consoling was much less effective than telling them in a tone that seemed to leave no room for negotiation or argument. It seemed almost like every direction I gave was more of a suggestion than an instruction. I didnt realize how entirely dry I was being. I did try to vary my tone, add a little bit of animation, and throw in a little that wasnt in the basal reader. Unfortunately, I still kind of failed in this area; in my defense, though, I hadnt truly worked with a basal reader much in the past and I was unsure of how far I was allowed to deviate from the script. The information presented in the basal readers isnt always relatable for students. The morning message usually serves to activate background knowledge and engage the students, but it seems to be the only point in the scripts where students are encouraged to make personal connections with their learning. I did notice that my pacing was terribly slow. At this point, I was still trying to address everything in the basal reader. It took a few tries before I finally realized that I was trying to do

too much in that block of time. Instead of trying to stuff it all into the whole group, I should have taken some out and done it only with small groups. I could have broken things down and only addressed it with students that needed more help in the area, such as the plural s ending meaning more than one and differentiating it from the inflected ending. Because I spent so much time in whole-group reviewing things that only a handful of students seemed to need more time with, most students were bored and disengaged from the lesson. I often had to prompt students answer questions, which resulted in them only copying what their neighbor (or certain students that nearly always had the correct answer) was saying. I am so thankful that Dr. Smith suggested breaking the whole-group lesson up with the smallgroup work. This seemed to help with attentiveness and students seemed to retain more

knowledge from the lesson. Having talked with my fellow student teacher, I knew that their class had already broken their reading block up. They would do reading and small-group in the morning and phonics in the afternoon. With the amount of worksheets that my teacher used on a daily basis, I could tell that she wanted her phonics worksheets done every day; I figured that pushing phonics to the afternoon would cause me to almost forget about it and it could slip through the cracks on some busy days. I did notice, however, that it was the fastest part of my lessons. This is one of the reasons why I decided to put phonics after small group. With as fast as phonics went, it would be easy to just fly through before or after lunch; it would also build confidence with those students in the middle and low groups during the whole-group session of phonics. Honestly, I feel like my lesson was very ineffective. I felt as if I spent so much time in the whole-group session that I had to rush through my small-group sessions. This cheated the

students that needed the individual attention out of valuable instruction time. Being able to see how many students were disengaged made me realize that I basically wasted my mornings until the middle of my first week of full-time teaching. Seeing that many disengaged students made me feel bad. It made me feel bad because I just sat by and let it happen. It made me feel bad because, even though every part of my brain was screaming out to use proximity and (to use the OBrien-ism) juggle flaming poodles if I had to to get their attention, I simply stuck to the script. It made me feel bad because I knew I wasted valuable instruction time. It made me feel bad because I could see how ineffective I was. I wish that my teacher had helped point me in the direction that my videotape did. I wish she had pointed out the flaws that were made so obvious to me by watching myself. If she had, maybe I could have realized this sooner and changed especially because this was the first subject that I picked up. I know that I will do better in the future.