Reflections First Semester

The aspect of my teaching practice that has improved most is probably my ability to implement and transition to various teaching strategies in one daily lesson plan. My students do not have very long attention spans. With an hour and thirty minutes of class time, I tend to loose my students if I only plan one or two actvities. I have learned how to split my actvitiy time into no more than 20 minute slots using several of the strategies learned in NTI. My students are still a bit chaty at times but the constant activity keeps them busy and thinking. I still need to improve on assessment activites to ensure that my students are accountable for the activities and do not use it as social time. I need to develop more rubrics, and better guidelines for completing the tasks. I still struggle with giving clear directions. Even when I take extra time to plan out and do an activity before giving it to the students, I leave out some bit of information necessary to complete the task correctly. It reminds me of the directions for makin a peanut butter sandwich activity we did in this summer! It's still difficult to gauge how much the students already know about completing the task without being too elementary.