The Life of a Denver Teacher Resident

What a week this has been. For the first time in weeks, I felt like a teacher. Well I have felt like a teacher since I was 12 years old, I guess I should say I felt like I was actually teaching something, then sitting back and observing. The time I have spent observing has been invaluably help in my education as a teacher and I wouldn’t forego that for anything. But I am not a sit and do nothing kind of guy. This week I taught every day and that was a great feeling. I got to implement some of the changes in the classroom that would benefit my students but also help with my SMART goals case study.

This week started with baseline testing for all the students with their letter sounds. As expected about 20% of the students knew their letter sounds fluently (80% or better). One of my students surprised me, knowing about 42% of the letter sounds presented. The daily oral phonemic awareness lesson that is a part of the core curriculum and further reinforced by the new routine being implemented by myself should strengthen their knowledge of their letter sounds and build up this awareness.

One thing I really need to work on is my timing. My lack of good timing was evident this week during my literacy lessons. I am not getting everything in that I need to (phonics, phonemic awareness, reading comp, reading and writing and workshop). My timing is down with the phonics and phonemic awareness; my main concern is getting the reading and writing goals into the lessons. Especially sense some of my students have these goals in their IEPs. With the exception of a few days, I will be teaching everyday until the middle of December. I can’t wait for planning and getting prepared. And I would be remised if I didn’t say I wasn’t just a little excited for the break from schoolwork.

My goal this week is to incorporate my students IEP goals in to my lessons and spend more time on actual reading with the students. I would also like to start a reading workshop in addition to the 3 workshops we already have running in the room. I would like to see my students reading independently at their levels and using the comprehension strategies we have been teaching over the last few weeks.

No post last week as I was not required to write a reflection for our short week of school. Last week I felt as if I was not fully on my game with the weather and some other events that occurred. I took our schools professional development day to refocus and this coming week will be much better and get me back on track. 2 more weeks until Thanksgiving break and then comes the real fun, 2 weeks of solid teaching. I missed the last scheduled lead teaching and I honestly cannot wait to get the feed back from the barrage of teachers and administrators that will be visiting my room while I am teaching. I MUST be on my A game!

So I made it through my first full day of teaching in the Mild/Moderate (resource) classroom. It was so fun! I know I might say that a lot, but teaching to me is fun. I taught the full day on Wednesday when I my lead teacher had IEP meetings and had a DTR meeting in the afternoon. Not that I do not love my new lead teacher, but the classroom felt like it was truly mine. I got to set it up how I would want it, and approached it as if I were the teacher of record. I really wish I got to record the lesson as I think it went very well.

One thing I did not plan for with Wednesday’s class is speech pull out. For 30 minutes of my literacy lesson I was doing one on one instruction with one of my students. I was teaching the concept of –ed being pronounced /ed/, /d/, and /t/. The student I work one on one with is an English Language learner and had difficulty with the concept. My main concern is if I was pronouncing the words correctly or if he was having difficulty because he is an EL. I also wonder if the successes we had seen with him earlier in the year were just outliers, as he is starting to express some symptoms of a processing disability or if his delays are related to his EL status. I reached out to my lead teacher and she had the same concerns, and would like to see how my case study goes with him before his IEP in late spring.

When the other students came back from speech I taught the lesson again to this group of 4. Based on the worksheets they completed 3 of the 4 students were beginning to understand the concept with one of the students truly mastering the concept, in his own writing. I did not get a chance to do the decodable text with these students this day and would like to have seen how the student were able to read the –ed sound in textually. I was out the next day due to seminar so I will have to check with my lead teacher about how they did.

I wrote my SMART goal for my case study part 4a this week. It is “The percentage of students scoring 80% on letter sound fluency and higher will increase from 25% to 75% by 12/15/2011 as measured by AIMSWeb Letter Sound Fluency Test.” I am going to start working this goal Monday with a baseline test to see how well the students are able to recognize their letter sounds. With my four case study students I expect 1 of the students be able to meet the goal on Monday without any further guidance. It will be interesting to see how the entire class does with this skill, as it is a critical component of the literacy curriculum and a required part of reading.

An exciting thing that I will also be starting next week is working on my first IEP. Under the guidance of my lead teacher I will work an IEP from start to finish starting with the referral paperwork on Monday and the testing over the next couple of months. I have attended plenty of IEP meetings over the past few years but I have never actually completed the IEP process. This is an thrilling step forward in my learning to be a special education teacher and a journey I am truly looking forward too.

My goals for the coming week are to teach every day. Monday I am teaching a required lesson for my literacy class and testing. Tuesday, I will be teaching all day in literacy and math. Wednesday, I will be teaching a phonics lesson with my class, starting to work on my SMART goal. Thursday I will be teaching for the first time before a non-regular day off and for the first time on a Thursday. I am teaching in the afternoon and have asked my lead teacher to give me feedback on my classroom management during math.

This was an abridged week for me. I was out sick for 3 of the 4 days of teaching. The day I was at work I really did not get a chance to teach, as I was still under the weather and not teaching to my best. So on Tuesday I mostly helped with the lesson that my lead teacher had planned and worked with the students getting more familiar with curriculum. I also worked directly with our student who is blind.

Again this week is observational data, with my student that is blind he really responds to my work with him using play-based techniques. When working with a shape puzzle he was able to put it back the shape in 1 of 3 trials hand over hand. He will be leaving us shortly and I will miss him, working with him has been fun and interesting. I learned so much working with him, most importantly patience. He will do much better in his future placement and I wish there was a way I could stay in touch with his progress.

My goal for the short week next week is to teach both days of literacy and work on routines that the Imagine It curriculum has in place. It will be nice to have a few days break but I am preparing for the December lead teaching and need to work on lesson planning for all subjects and grade levels.

This is going to sound very egotistical but every now and then I like to google my name to see what is out there under my name. I have a personal life and I try my hardest to keep it separate from my work life. I have two facebook accounts, well pretty much 2 of everything. So I like to make sure there is no bleed over from one side of my life to the other.

Well in tonight’s googling adventure I found a link on the third or fourth page that caught my eye… and here…  This is totally awesome, someone is actually reading this blog, well 3-4 people are that I know of. Most of this blogs content is from my weekly reflections that I have to turn in for my program but they are really everything that i am doing in the school to help my kids. I don’t talk about my school stuff because that would just be boring. I am hoping that in the spring term I can talk more about my adventure from the student perspective, myself as a student that is.

Also I have been thinking Doctorate lately, I know, finish the masters first, but I am driven by making a change in students lives and I think the best way forward is through technology especially in the Special Education classroom. Plus I want my doctorate before I am 40 so I can actually do something with it.

This was an interesting week. It was like starting all over again, but in a completely different environment. The classroom had already been established and the special education groupings in place. My goal this week was to take a laid back role at the beginning of the week and start connecting with the students.

A lot of my data from this week is observational. While I did not formally teach a lesson, I informally worked in the small groups to support my new lead teacher. At one point on Tuesday, Ms. George had a visitor in the room during one of her groups. I took it upon myself to take over the group and finish the lesson (it was just completing a packet of worksheets). The students were able to complete the packet and I was able to increase the rigor of the packet but changed it by assigning colors that the students had to complete selected items with.

Overall the week went well, I am really connecting my new lead teacher and my new group of students. But I am ready to get back into teaching. This weekend I started planning for the new week but I am having issues with the new curriculum. I don’t see major issues with it, I just have to get used to working with such a scripted program. My goal over the next week is to get familiar with the program and it’s electronic components. I also want to teach a few lessons and get back into the swing of things.

This was a sad week, I had to make a decision on whether or not leave my lead teacher and my kiddos and move on to a different lead and a different set of students. My previous lead teacher and I were not connecting well and after things were said, I decided it would be best for both of us to part ways. After the week ended, I am much more relaxed and ready to for the next adventure in the DTR. I will miss my students but will be much more prepared to be an effective teacher in a future classroom.

For the week I taught 2 half days and 1 full day when my lead teacher was out of the school for a meeting. On my Monday half day we focused on Division and working with division with no remainders. I was working with three students. 1 of the students had about an 80% understanding of division, the other two students no so much. One of the students has issues with multiplication facts and has issues connecting them with division. The other student had issues with how to set up and dividing the larger number by the smaller number.

Tuesday morning went well the day started with the students eating breakfast and running the morning meeting. After the morning meeting I broke the class up into 3 groups and we went through literacy centers as well as I could do it.

Tuesday also started with work on division with remainders. This was a littler harder then the other division setup and of the 3 students in my group 1 had a 50% understanding of it (the same one as before who had an 80% understanding) and the other 2 did not have as much luck. I started using realia in my lessons and used cookies to explain sets and groups with a remainder. Wednesday, we taught the same lesson for division with much more success for the students who did not understand the concept. All three of the students need at least another week on the concept but it will be best reinforced in the spiraling and scaffolding in future lessons.

My goal for the coming week is to learn my new lead teachers style and jump into a new classroom slowly. I don’t want to come off as overbearing to my new lead teacher but I also only want to spend about one day getting to know the classroom through observation and then start working on lessons and teaching students.

One would think by now I would know how to start these things. This week went well. I found out I am a licensed teacher in the State of Colorado and the students I worked with seemed to do well when it came to the lessons I taught.

We started the week in math working with factors. I designed a lesson that focused on looking at what factors went into the number and finding the number on a multiplication chart. The students seemed to have a hard time matching the column to the row and finding the number on the multiplication chart.

To build multiplication fact knowledge an as a way to increase speed in finding factors (needed for division in the next weeks lesson) I started doing daily minute drills of multiplication facts. I know rote memorization is not the best way to learn, but with math fact like multiplication facts, the students seem to be remembering the fact and can apply them to when they need to learn. The students also enjoy the competition involved in trying to get the most problems done in the minute time frame.

I have also built into my daily warm up a multiplication chart that the students fill out, this shows me what facts the students need the most practice with. For both of the students I introduced this to this week it gave me some ideas on how to work with them. One student had little or no difficulty working with facts 1-5, but when it came to his 6, 7 facts he had some difficulty. This showed me where to work with him on his math facts. One way I plan on offering him support is to give him a cd with the math facts and he will listen to them when he is filling out his chart to have an auditory cue to help him learn the facts.

One activity I did this week was use food items to help teach the lesson. The students loved this, especially when they got to eat some of it. It was also a different manipulative that they could use and relate to for later when they don’t have the base-ten blocks or two-color counters handy.

This coming week I will be taking over the class for a 1 full day, 2 half days and working on one individual lesson. My goals for the week are to help the student being to master division and start to focus on more literacy lessons. My lead teacher will be gone Tuesday morning for meetings and has an IEP meeting Tuesday as well so I expect this day to be exciting and challenging at the same time. Another goal I have this week is to work more with the paras on setting the expectations they have for me and letting me know what they need to help the students.

This week my focus was to prepare my group of students in Math for the mini test I was going to give on Friday covering the first 5 lessons. Monday we worked on estimation, two out of the five students in my group understood this concept. During the lesson we focused on higher numbers in the hundreds. Again I did not think about differentiation for my students. I should have started with lower numbers in the tens.

I was out sick on Tuesday, but I had my lead teacher continue to work on estimation. When I got back on Wednesday my lead teacher and I discussed how it went. She felt that with some of the students who did not get the concept of Monday, it would be a better use of our time and the students if we move on from estimation. Even adding realia to the lessons they would not find connections to their lives. We will spiral back to it later in the unit but for now its better if we don’t confuse the students.

Wednesday started with a lesson on arrays and using them in for repeated addition and multiplication. My group was smaller then usual due to some absences in the class. In the small group, I introduced new vocabulary words and demonstrated the difference between columns and rows using hand signals. Once we got through the “I do” part of the lesson we went into the “we do” part of the lesson. The four students in my group had some difficulty with the concept of using the manipulatives to demonstrate the idea of multiples. After the “we do” part of the lesson we focused on working with multiplication fact families. With two of the students I had them work independently on multiplication worksheets. With the other two students I work with them in together on arrays and helped them with setting up the repeated addition problems.

Friday we decided to not introduce new content and did a review day. This is the day I gave the mini test to see how the students understood the concepts being taught. On the first three questions, out of the 5 students, they scored 75%. Which is a major accomplishment for these students. On the estimation and arrays questions the students were not as successful. This could be because the students have not had a much practice on these concepts. I plan on spiraling back to these concepts in “do now” exercises and in review days later on.

My goal for next week is to explore more about my students and learn more how they can relate to the learning. I would like to build more realia into my lessons and build some activities into my lesson that teach the students to create their own manipulatives that they can use in real life.

I never know how to begin reflection papers. I don’t want to come off complaining or say that everything was fine. While nothing traumatic happened this week, it had its own bumps and caused a few bruises (to my ego more then anything else). This week saw the class gain a new student. He came in the first day in a long sleeve shirt and without shoes. In conversations with my Lead Teacher this is not unusual, and apparently on Thursday he was dressed the same way, wearing the same clothes. My Lead Teacher all but cried when she was explaining his home situation to me and it took everything in my power not to become just as irate. I am learning that if I stay in special education in classes like the one I am with now I will need to balance my emotions and feelings for individual students and for the greater good of the classroom.

Lessons this week went well. The read aloud was fun. One change I would make is to change up how I present the material it contains. On Monday the students did not seem as engaged as they did in the past, with many of them having their heads down or starring off into the distance. One change I will make for my next read aloud is to do it while they are eating breakfast so they can focus on my reading and keep their hands and mouths occupied while eating breakfast.

The math lesson I taught this week was a bit more successful. I taught my first whole class math lesson on place value and the vocabulary associated with it. My Lead Teacher suggested I use a graphic organizer that had the students write the definition, draw a picture, write a connection and then write a meaningful sentence. I took this advice as that I needed to use this, as this is what the students were used to from previous years. This was not the case and caused me to spend more time on 3-4 words when I could have modified the sheet and just simply used the definition and picture and finished working will all the required words. For future lessons we are going to do this. The class was then broken up into two groups, a higher-level group that worked with me directly and a lower level group that worked with my Lead Teacher. For the group that was working with me, the lesson continued with some worksheets, going over the place values and graphic representations of the various numbers between one and 10,000. While we were working in a group with teacher help the students we able to grasp the concept with five out of five students completing the worksheet with the guidance of a teacher or para. However, when homework was sent home using a similar worksheet only one student out of the five students completed the worksheet correctly. This was caused by confusion with the worksheet being presented one way in class, and differently as the homework assignment. One way I see to elevate this is by explicitly going over the homework before the students take it home to clear up any confusion.

The second math lesson I taught was in a small group of five to seven students. Working with the hands-on standards book we completed lesson one. The students were engaged and were actively participating in the lesson. For this lesson the students were being pulled out for OT services (The OT stayed in the classroom with groups of two to three). The group size remained the same but the make-up of the group did not. The two students that remained in the group and did not get OT services both understood the lesson, completing the worksheet pages and going on to the next activity with no teacher support. The concept and worked through the push-in distraction. The students who were pulled out of the group came right back were also able to respond to and complete the lesson with minimal para/teacher support.

With the Teach Like a Champion goal of the week being SLANT, I worked on reinforcing the school policy of SLANT and building that into my lesson. During my read aloud I did have to remind the class to SLANT more than in previous lessons, but this could have been due the new student in the classroom and the distraction of just having finished eating breakfast. However, I only had to say SLANT 3 times during my whole group lesson and twice during the small group lesson. The class is getting familiar with the technique and why it is important for them to be successful.

One of things I learned this week was build upon the positive aspect of a relationship, whether it is with the students, my paras or my Lead Teacher. I also need to celebrate the successes of everyone, understanding that positive praise is a necessity in the classroom and one that has a profound impact on all parties. When writing my lessons, especially with my class, I need to write language objectives and not just assume that I will build language into my teaching. One learning item that is continuing on from last week is my need to slow down and give more wait time. I need to stop hovering over my students and allow them time to think. I need to give more wait time, but at the same time not allow the student to opt out of the question or learning.