Wow....what a first week! So many new faces and new challenges and not enough time in the day!
I've been all over the place this week. In the classroom I've been teaching grade 8 history, a chapter on colonial attitudes towards Confederation. The week went pretty well. Started the week with a review of material covered by a supply teacher last week by using a Venn diagram on the board and inviting students to add colnies into the "for" or "against" Confederation and explain why each colony goes where it does. The next day we started preparing for an oral presentation on colonial attitudes. I started by getting student input into an Anchor chart listing the expectations for the presentation and the different roles for group woork. The next day the students were divided up into groups to prepare with presenations to follow. I definitely would change the way I organized it in the future. Instead of asssigning different roles (researcher, recorder, presenter, etc...) i would have divided the work load differently (one student responsible for population of a colony, another for defence, etc..) The presentations went well though. Just finishing my marking now! I also wrote my first test this week....students are taking it on Wednesday.
Management is certainly an issue but not as pressing as I thought it might be. My students respect me and II have certainly made an effort to connect with them and have learned a lot about them and their individual needs or habits. This to me is why I am not having serious management issues, well, that and that I'm a large man. Mr. B. has alos given me a lot of good advice on some techniques I an use (voice fluctuation, varying tones, the all important pause and wait for silence)
The one thing that I am finding a little frustrating is just how much time I have to spend explaining instructions and expectations to my students. It wastes a lot of teaching time.
More next week
Simon, I hear you. I feel like there just isn't enough time to get through everything I want to get through. I think my major challenge over the next few weeks will be not so much classroom management as time management! How do we make the most of a 50-minute period? It's so difficult.
ReplyDeleteWhat I find most frustrating is that I constantly second-guess my decisions. I write a lesson plan, and then I look it over and decide it's no good, but then I write another, and then I decide the first one was the best after all. It's just so difficult to decide what is the most important thing to teach and then to decide whether you're presenting it in a way that makes it accessible.
Anyway, enough of that tangent. It sounds like you're learning a lot and having a great time. Rock on for the next three weeks!