I would consider classroom practice to be the area in which I have most improved throughout the course of my MAT year. My teacher presentations have become much more efficient throughout the duration of the year and I now feel that I can deliver the information my students need in a way that they can understand. Most importantly, I can deliver directions that are clear to my students and directly related to our daily objective. When I can give my students clear directions like this, they are able to work independently with success. I have also become quite comfortable with using collaborative activities in the classroom. From math partners to social studies discussion groups, I have used a variety of grouping styles and techniques to best meet the needs of my learners and move our whole class understanding forward. In group, independent, and whole class settings, I have refined my questioning techniques to make my students’ thinking visible and to guide them toward new heights in their thinking. I have improved immensely in this regard and feel comfortable using guiding questions to check for understanding and to prompt deeper thinking. As I continue to work toward developing student skills, I have crafted varied assignments that measures student knowledge and support student learning needs. Throughout the arc of my placements, I have been able to apply my learning to all areas of elementary subject matter and developed classroom structures and activities that are suited to each discipline and unit.

During my summer experience, I began to explore different strategies for teacher presentation including PowerPoints, read alouds, and anchor charts. I noticed quite early on that my teacher presentations were a bit lengthy and I was eager to make my presentations more efficient while also offering more support to my students. Having a visual support (such as an anchor chart) helped me to stay on track and gave my students a visual reminder of what they needed to do next.

My fall placement was an interesting experience for me because I was hoping to simultaneously improve the quality of my teacher presentations while reducing the overall quantity of time spent on teacher presentations in class. One of the ways that I was able to do this was through giving students more chances to share during my direct teacher presentations. If it was not absolutely necessary for me to explain something, I asked a student to read, share, or offer a suggestion. This practice is especially important for students, as well as for my own teacher presentation skills because students may be more likely to recall something if they have talked about it aloud (Denton, 2014, p. 29). I was fortunate to have a mentor teacher who often practiced this skill and asked for student input as often as he could. I picked up on this skill and as the semester progressed, I found myself inserting even more student talk than I had originally planned in my lessons. In my lesson on introducing a TDC (topic, detail, conclusion) paragraph, I had intended for students to read a sentence of our sample paragraph aloud. In the moment when I actually taught this lesson, a student read a sentence aloud and then explained what kind of sentence he thought it was and why he thought this was so. I loved the way that he had been thinking about what he had read, so I decided to continue that practice through the rest of the lesson when students read from our sample paragraph. In this fashion, the student talk during my teacher presentations increased with just a little prompting on my part.

In the fall, I also focused my classroom practice on increasing collaborative activities and questioning techniques in my teaching. I found collaborative activities to be a wonderful way to make seemingly dull subject matter exciting for my learners. This worked out especially well in one of my spelling lessons. My mentor teacher tasked me with creating a spelling unit and making it interesting and engaging for students. I settled on a station-rotation model for one of my lessons and had small groups of students making silly sentences, sorting spelling words, quizzing each other with flashcards, and unscrambling spelling words. Tomlinson and Imbeau (2010) note that working in groups can be motivating for students, so I decided to try some group work as a way to help students engage with their spelling unit on the 1-1-1 doubling rule (if a word has one syllable with one consonant at the end and one vowel before the consonant, the final consonant is doubled before adding a suffix) (Tomlinson & Imbeau, 2010, p. 90). I specifically did not have a teacher-directed station so that I could support groups as needed and observe students’ behavior as they moved through the stations. This lesson also represented the first time my students had used stations in their homeroom, so I was curious as to how they would react. The class stayed focused on their spelling words for the entire lesson block and I was able to collect some great information about which types of activities worked well for which students. I also used some collaborative work in math class, where students worked with their math partners on nearly every activity in class, and in my reading group, where I gradually released the students to manage the discussion on their own while I participated as a listener rather than a facilitator. In these cases, I found that allowing students some freedom to work together led to interesting insights and peer to peer teaching opportunities that students remembered all semester.

My spring placement brought a new opportunity to build upon on my teacher presentations. My mentor teacher had lots of great ideas for how to model tasks for students to give them an understanding of what they would be asked to do. I picked up on this idea immediately as a way to build in guided practice for my students before allowing them to work on their own or with a small group. By asking students question about a model or having students complete the model as a class, I was able to assess my students’ understanding and offer them support for their upcoming work. In one particular lesson, I asked students to help me create a main event that had all of the elements we had recently deemed important for a strong, detailed main event. The process of writing it together  allowed me to assess students’ understanding while offering students a chance to share and discuss ideas. In the end, our whole class felt a sense of pride in the collaborative the finished product.

I was also able to refine my questioning and discussion techniques in the spring through a number of read aloud opportunities in two different Reading classes. My mentor teacher was responsible for teaching two Reading classes every day, one of which is the inclusion classroom for third grade reading. Although I was typically reading the same book to both classes, I knew that these two groups of learners had different needs and connected with the books in different ways. To reach all of my learners, I had to think about the different ways my students might experience this book and offer opportunities for students in both classes to connect with the story. One of my most important takeaways from these experiences was the notion of probing a student to “say more” or “tell me why you think that”. Although sometimes a student’s initial response seemed off-base, with a bit of probing I realized that my students often had wonderful ideas and just needed the chance to explain their thinking a bit more. When I was able to ask probing questions and thus validate my students’ responses and connections, we were able to have a productive and curious classroom environment where all students voices are respected parts of our group conversation.