Internship Final Reflection Paper

My student teaching internship began with my placement in a Huntsville City School named Blossomwood Elementary. Blossomwood Elementary is a predominantly white school located in the medical district of Huntsville. Their current location is temporarily off of Woodmont Avenue while their new school is being remodeled. Their current enrollment is 468 students. They have approximately 30 teachers at the school with an average student to teacher ratio of 15. The principal of the school when I first began my internship was Dr. Vasile, but she left her position for a position at Central Office as overseer of the empowered schools. The new principal of Blossomwood is Mrs. Finley, the former principle of Monte Sano. My first placement at Blossomwood Elementary was spent in Mrs. Hensons fourth grade classroom in the portables. There are 18 students total in Mrs. Hensons class, with eight girls and ten boys. My second placement was spent in Mrs. Richs Special Education class, which had 14 students. I learned many important strategies for quickly assessing students learning during my two placements, such as using white boards during a lesson I taught on nouns. In order to see if the students had understood the lesson, I passed out white boards to each of them and had them write down an example of a person, place, or thing from a sentence in their English books. When they held their boards up, I got the chance to quickly see who understood the concept and who needed more help. I would then give the students the answer and explain why it was the answer in order to scaffold those students that did not understand the concept. Then, I would give them more sentences for practice until majority of them were correct. Another important item that I learned in my first placement was how to write lesson plans that flowed almost like a script. I found that this was necessary when teaching because I wanted to have the directions I needed to give students for an activity specifically stated so that there

would be no confusion. I found this out particularly during a lesson I did on rounding. I had a piece of yarn for the students to hold to represent a number line, and then different numbers ranging from 300 to 400, with 350 in the middle. I had one student stand at one end of the number line with the number 300, then another student in the middle with 350, and finally a third student on the other end of the line with the number 400. I passed out the other number cards to students and they had to go and find their place on the number line, then pass their card either to the 300 student if they would round down, or the 400 student if they would round up. The students enjoyed this lesson, but it was rather chaotic at first because the students were unsure of what to do. I should have given the students the instructions explicitly and before we went outside to do the activity with the yarn and number cards. Then I would have had their full attention and they would have understood my directions much more clearly. My belief system about teaching did change somewhat after I completed my internship. I had always known that teaching was going to be a difficult task, but I did not realize just how intense it was going to be. During my first placement in Mrs. Hensons class, I found that I never had enough time to get everything done. I would plan a lesson completely, time included and all, but the time I had planned for was never the actual amount of time it took to do an activity, and I felt like I was constantly playing catch-up. In the Collaborative setting, it seemed even more difficult. Every student had different needs that needed to be met, and most of the teachers were used to simply sending work to be finished with the student. This became very frustrating to deal with because after collaborating with each students teacher, I had created lesson plans that fit the students IEP goals as well as fit what their teacher said they needed help with. However, the teachers would send work anyway and would get upset when it was not done.

Another way my belief system about teaching changed was that I had always previously believed that all assessment was important and that students must be assessed as much as possible to monitor their learning. While I still believe this to be true to an extent, I found that assessment in Huntsville City Schools is an all too frequent occurrence. The teachers are at the point where they are incredibly frustrated and stressed since they are assessing their students so often with different formal assessments that they have no time to actually teach. Not all assessments have to be formal, and I think that this is something that needs to be realized so that teachers can continue to teach. The two areas of teaching that I found that I am the strongest in are content and pedagogy, specifically in the teaching and assessment areas. I always make sure that when I teach a lesson, I understand the content completely and double check my resources to make sure that I am teaching it correctly. For example, as a part of my unit, I had to teach a lesson on similes and metaphors. There was no teachers manual to go along with this lesson, so I had to research the information and examples on my own online. I found that many sites had incorrect definitions of what a simile and metaphor truly are. Many said simply that they compare two words, but this is false information. Similes compare two nouns using the words like or as, and metaphors make a direct comparison between two nouns without using the words like or as. I found the correct information from a trusted educational website. I then made sure to research many different examples of each and fully understand when the comparison was a simile or a metaphor. I believe that my second strongest area is found in pedagogy, specifically the areas of teaching and assessment because I always made sure when writing my lesson plans to align all lessons with the Alabama Course of Study. I collaborated with teachers on a regular basis in both

setting, but especially in the Special Education room. Every Friday, I went around to all of the teachers of the students I had and collaborated with them to meet the students educational needs. I frequently used technology in my lessons, and even made my own power point on similes and metaphors for my unit. I also created a Jeopardy game for the students to review for their math test. Finally, assessment is an area of strength for me because I frequently used formative assessments such as white boards during my lesson on nouns, and tickets out the door. In order to leave the classroom, the students had to either tell me the answer or write down the answer to a question I would ask. For example, I had them write down one simile for me one time as a ticket out the door. This was a quick way of showing me they understood what a simile was. For both of my units in both placements, I created pre and post-tests. This gave me an idea of what students knew prior to my instruction, and if my instruction was effective in teaching them what I wanted it to teach. My two weakest areas of teaching were classroom management and diversity. My classroom management has improved since I began my student teaching, but I still feel that it is something I need to work on. I am unsure of how to handle certain situations with students. For example, during one of my lessons there was a student who absolutely refused to participate. He constantly tried to do things to interrupt my instruction, such as talking loudly in the middle of the lesson, and even slamming his books. I was unsure of whether ignoring him or taking action would be the best way to proceed, but I decided to take action. This resulted in him being in an even more defiant mood, which made me even more frustrated and upset with him. My cooperating teacher stepped in at this point to help me so that I could continue my instruction, but in my classroom, I will not have someone to step in for me. That is why I feel that I need to

work on managing my classroom more. I intend to discuss with my cooperating teacher and other professionals more on how they handle situations like this, and attend more positive behavioral support seminars to add more strategies to my repertoire. Diversity was my other weakest area. I was not very adept at collaborating with other teachers, and creating lesson plans that fit the needs of all of my students, including my student with an IEP, when I began my first placement. I decided to change this during my second placement. I collaborated every Friday with the teachers of my students to make sure I was fitting their individual needs when lesson planning, and gave them each a learning styles inventory to find out how they learned the best. I read every one of their IEPs to make sure that I was creating lessons to meet their educational goals, and gave them the accommodations that they needed to succeed. I still feel as though I have more to learn in this area even though I have improved. I will try to incorporate more emphasis on cultural diversity on my classroom, such as having a beginning of the year project where students share their cultural backgrounds with the class, or having a holiday project where they research how different cultures celebrate Christmas. I know how important diversity is to creating a classroom community, and so I will strive to become more proficient in this area, as well as in classroom management. In conclusion, I felt that my student teaching internship was an extremely beneficial, difficult, and necessary time in my professional career. The experience that I gained from being in the actual classroom setting and acting as the teacher for a significant period of time was so different from anything else that I learned from my education classes. It gave me the opportunity to apply what I had heard in lectures, which did not always turn out the way I thought that it would. I was able to learn from the experiences that I had and figure out which strategies and lessons worked, and which did not. I learned how to interact with students as well as other school

personnel, and I became familiar with the assessments and grading systems that teachers use. Without this student teaching experience, I would not feel prepared in any way to accept a teaching position in a school. This internship has prepared me fully to the point where I would feel comfortable starting immediately as a full time educator.