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Evidence #3: Internship Activities |
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Evidence #3: Internship Activities
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My third evidence include 1) a weekly reflective journal turned into my supervising professor for my Final Internship, and 2) the thought bubble activity two of my students did, and 3) a lesson plan I implemented after completing this thought bubble assessment strategy. I discuss many topics throughout the reflection, but one in particular is about a unique assessment strategy I had my children do. After my students didn’t do as well as I thought they would on various math tests and assessments, I provided them an activity to help assess their thoughts and feelings about math. They were instructed to draw, in the blank face, how they feel about math. For example, if they didn’t like math, they could draw a frownie face. In the thought bubble, the children were told to treat it like a diary, and tell me honestly how they felt about math. I ensured them that nobody would read their writing except me, and I wouldn’t tell anybody. The provided lesson plan shows how I implemented a math lesson after analyzing the data gathered from my thought bubble assessment to better teach my students. This evidence reflects on my experience doing this kind of assessing to help my teaching, and also what I learned from doing this.
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This third evidence provided meets AP #1 in a number of ways. After completing this activity with my students, I was more easily able assess their needs ranging from cognitive, social, linguistic, cultural, emotional and physical. Sometimes students aren’t always so great with explaining their feelings with words, either written or spoken. Providing them an assessment opportunity to draw what their face looks like when they think about math helps me to see how they truly feel and can help me determine better ways of teaching my students. Also, allowing the students to write anything they wanted to tell me, about their feelings about mathematics, truly helped me to see what my students felt and thought, regardless of their performance in class. In the provided thought bubble worksheets, you will see that both students instinctively drew sad or angry faces. These two particular students I never would have thought would draw this. They obtained average to above average scores in math, so I never really figured they would have a problem with math. While this seemed like a fun activity for the students, for me it was a unique assessment tool that I will continue to use in the future as ongoing assessment. I was able to find out things about my students that a paper and pencil test could never show. I was able to critique and analyze these writings from my students and compare them with their performance in class (assessed by observation, class discussion, and written work). I have been able to develop instructional plans tailored to whole class, group, and individual instruction based on the students’ cognitive, social, linguistic, cultural, emotional and physical needs, as shown in the provided lesson plan as evidence. I created a system of private conferencing, where as students are working, one at a time they will come over to me in a private area (mostly my desk), and basically we just talk all about the lesson and what they are doing. If they don’t understand or need further help, I provide it at that time. If they want to ask me any questions or talk to me about anything (regarding the current lesson), this is their time. They show me what they’ve done so far on their assignment and I make sure they are on the right track. This private conferencing strategy has been very successful for my class. I have found they truly do open up more to me in private, and this also has made them more serious about their work because they now know that they are going to have to show it to me one-on-one. I never would have adopted this approach if I hadn’t done the assessment activity with my students. The thought bubble activity truly showed me specific needs of my students, and I was able to develop activities that help meet these many needs.
My evidence proves I have implemented this assessment strategy in the classroom with my entire Level III internship class. My students were individually impacted in different ways. I took the comments and drawings from each student and analyzed them one by one. After critically analyzing these assessments about their thoughts and feelings of math, I came up with several instructional plans to help my students develop to their fullest potential. I also believe the students learned something about themselves as well. They had probably never been asked to critique and analyze their own thoughts and feelings like that before. I had a student who wrote to me that he never asked questions during whole class instruction because he didn’t want anyone to think he was dumb. I did two things with the entire class to focus on this issue. One is creating an environment of respect, cooperation, and being a good team player. If the learning atmosphere of the classroom is positive and encouraging, no student will feel intimidated to speak up when they need some clarification or further instruction. Another strategy I developed is giving the students to ask me questions one-on-one after I have implemented a new lesson. They can either come up to me and talk to me, or while I am teaching they can jot down notes about what they need extra help on or what confuses them, and show me their notes after I am done with my instruction. My provided lesson plan is evidence for this. The method of private conferencing I implemented in my provided lesson plan definitely had a positive impact on my students. This allowed them the chance to ask me questions without anyone else around. It gave them a chance for me to see their current progress on their assignments, and give them each pointers and encouragement. It also has helped them focus on the importance of doing satisfactory work, since they know I am going to be individually checking their performance. Another student told me she is fine when I am there to guide and scaffold their thinking and work, but as soon as she is doing homework at home, or doing a test individually, she forgets how to ‘do’ the problems. For this, I developed different ways of helping my students memorize different operations they need to know in order to solve problems. I also have helped them to memorize their addition and subtraction facts up to 20. Instead of spelling bees, I developed math bees, where I give them addition and subtraction facts, and they have to answer. These strategies and activities have definitely helped the students feel more comfortable working with numbers, it has helped them be able to easily determine which operation they would need to use for specific word problems. Therefore, according to their assessment results that they wrote to me, I have created several strategies specific to their cognitive, social, linguistic, cultural, emotional and physical needs, and taught them all different ways to feel confident about themselves in math.
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