Reflections

Things that have worked: Starting out this year I came in better prepared and organized. Having my lesson plans completed and learning different teaching strategies helped me have a better start. Now I see the kids more engaged and eager to learn. I love when I use one of the discipline strategies and it actually work. The kids honor the classroom/lab procedures, it is amazing when the kids notice and let each other know if they break one of the rules. This year has been better because I don't allow myself to get bogged down with so much work that I am taking home. I plan my day accordingly completing all paper work before or immediately after school. I am not taking alot of work home with me each day. So the benefits of making sure I am organized is really working well for me.

Many of the techniques and strategies we learned in NTI I have tried to but them to use. I must say I wish I could have had this course at the beginning of my educational career. Having it now let me look back and know what not to do or where I do not want to go through again. Many of the things learned I share with some veteran teachers, they wish they had attended a course like NTI back when they started teaching,

Things that have not worked: I am not going to say they didn't work but I think that there are things that I need more training on. That would be in the area of working in the labs. Its so hard to do the split class because you will always have someone that is not going to stay on task. The way my class is set up, it is merely impossible to moniter the kids in the lab cooking up against the kids that are in the class area working. My only suggestion would be to have a paraprofessional that could watch the students in the classroom while I conduct the kitchen lab of students. Even if I conduct a lab with the entire class the setup makes it hard to moniter all of the students at the same time. Also I need to work on moving around the classroom more, since we don't use desk we have tables and chairs it seems to crowd the space. With this it makes it hard to walk around the room as much as I would like. Due to the class size I have looked at different ways we can set up the room to make it more easy flowing, so the classroom setup has not worked for me as well as I would have like.