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Reflective Blog Post

Drexel University
EDUC540
Ryan Burks
11/1/2015

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Reflective Blog Post

Blog Entry:
October 30, 2015: This was a crazy and hectic day at Delavan Junior High School as it
was the day before Halloween. Kids were excited to be dressed up in their Halloween costumes
and teachers got in on the act as well. It was much harder to keep the students on task throughout
the day, but the students seemed to be very happy and truly enjoyed being at the school today. To
add more excitement to the day, there was a pep assembly scheduled for the last hour of the
school day to recognize the students who made honor roll and also highlight some of the sports
achievements during the first 9 week term. The highlight of the pep assembly was the annual
Teacher-Student volleyball game in which I was a participant.
However, there was one major takeaway from the actual school day and the activities that
happened in Literature class. We have been reading The Giver for the past couple of weeks and
students have been struggling with the quizzes that are given to them every few chapters. Myself
and the cooperating teacher have tried many different strategies with them, but the last quiz we
took, almost the entire class failed. Since then, I have been requiring students to take notes on the
chapters that they read and also write down any questions that they think of as they are reading.
Today we had a quiz over a few of the chapters and I was very happy to see that almost every
student got an A on the quiz! While the students complained about having to write down notes,
they were all thrilled about their performance on the quiz this afternoon. Many of the students
were embarrassed to be continually failing these quizzes and I was glad that I was able to help
them overcome their reading comprehension struggles. I hope for future success on the next set
of quizzes to be taken next week.

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Reflection:
While I was extremely thrilled with the students results on the quiz during this particular
class period, there were many other days where I was discouraged just as the students were. I felt
like no matter what strategy I, or the cooperating teacher, were using just simply wasnt effective
and the results showed that. I understand that the students must take some responsibility in their
performance on these quizzes, but it was very discouraging to not be able to offer them
suggestions to help them. We were eventually able to come up with a strategy to help with their
reading comprehensions, but something should have been done earlier on in the novel and
subsequent quizzes.
Most of the themes that are present in this particular journal entry are related to Domain
1: Planning and Preparation and Domain 3: Instructional Delivery. Domain 1b: Demonstrating
Knowledge of Students was shown in my eventual ability to create a teaching strategy that would
be effective and create better results for the students. I was able to realize that students werent
focusing enough during their reading and they needed to be assigned an activity to stress more
focus during their independent reading time. Also this journal entry relates to Doman 1f:
Designing student assessments. The quizzes were designed to test the students reading
comprehension, but there wasnt enough self-assessment present during the earlier portions of
the novel. All aspects in Domain 3 were related to this journal entry and most of them centered
on the classroom instruction that was given in relation to the novel. Expectations were made
clear to the students, but students werent fully engaged during the first couple chapters of the
novel. Students didnt understand how important it was to read the chapters closely even though
they were aware that there would be comprehension quizzes. As we move forward throughout

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the novel I hope that we see better results on the quizzes, and that the students continue to use
the strategies that proved to give them better results.