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Second Rotation Week 5 of Practicum

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 This was the last week of my practicum experience at Burris and I am extremely grateful for all of the experiences I was able to have at Burris with my mentor teacher and my students. It was really bittersweet leaving my students and it was quite hard. I always thought that I would only want to teach middle school, but this experience has made me reevaluate my thoughts. I know in the future I will teach high school students at some point. They were so wonderful and although I came into the classroom at the beginning of the semester kind of awkward because it was a big jump going from 6th grade last year to seniors, the students were accepting and receptive to me being there. I learned so much from my mentor teacher, areas that I can still improve upon, and where I was really successful. I also learned how to be comfortable in a high school classroom, which was part of my ACORN Smart Goal. I was able to teach several lessons between Sociology and Government, and then co-teach in So...
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Second Rotation Week 4 of Practicum

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 This week in practicum has been another week filled with creating student-teacher relationships. I feel like this week with my Government students, that they have begun to open up more and ask for help when needed. This class has always been more reserved and less willing to connect with me than my Sociology students. I think this is due to the structure of the government class. The students do lots of group work and although I interact with students each day in that class, they are more in the sense of individuals who solve their own problems and group collaboration rather than asking questions or raising concerns. One student in government who I sometimes independently help because the student does not stay on track and struggles to 'lock in' and get work done, was able to finish a project that students were to present on Thursday. This student sat at the back table and I worked with the student on the project outline, keeping the student focused on the task, and answering q...
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Week 3 Second Rotation of Practicum

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 This week in practicum students in Sociology began working on individual research projects of their choosing. Students are to pick a topic that correlates with one of the topics within Sociology. Students will be using the Scientific Method to complete their research. Students have gone over the steps of the Scientific Method and spent time identifying what the Independent and Dependent variable is, and what a research question and hypothesis is. A class period was spent collaborating and each student spoke about the topic they were thinking about researching, how they would research it, whether it be a survey or field observation, etc. and then my mentor teacher and I asked them questions, guided them, or helped some students come up with topics. For the rest of the semester, I will be co-teaching in Sociology with my mentor teacher. Students began on Friday learning about how to write a research paper and were asked to identify their topic, the IV and DV, and their research ques...
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Second Rotation, Week two of Practicum

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 This week in Practicum, I was able to teach my EdTPA lesson. I taught my week-long lesson in Sociology and it covered Race, Ethnicity, and Minority Groups. Within the lesson, I also taught about Stereotypes, Prejudice, Discrimination, and Racism. Students were given at the beginning of the week a packet that included the Guided Notes that they would use to follow along with on the slides that would be presented, and space to write any other notes. Within the packet, students had a Think-Pair-Share that was completed on Monday as a pre-assessment. The packet also included questions for both of the primary source readings students would be completing for the Socratic Seminar Discussion on Thursday, along with guidelines for the discussion. Students were told on Monday that their notes were important for their final (summative) assessment of the unit on Friday. The summative assessment was comprised of fifteen multiple-choice questions and a short written response portion at the end....
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Second Rotation Week 1 Practicum

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 Being back in the classroom at Burris this week has been great. I had missed the students quite a bit and was excited to be back and working with them. Students in Sociology were finishing up the Sociology of Criminalization and were presenting their projects on different prison systems. Students in Sociology later in the week have been learning about the Social Construct of Reality and have been working on a new assignment. Students in government had a whole class discussion over presidential topics nad have now been working on projects on how a president gets elected and how the process of becoming president works. Students have had pretty relaxed class periods this week and there has not been a whole lot of structure. Students are on their phones, off-topic, but for the most part, most students are working and are getting things done. Students engage with one another respectfully and the classroom climate is still very much aligned with SEL and a Trauma Informed Classroom. Stud...
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Week 4 of Practicum at Burris Laboratory School

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 This week at Burris Laboratory gave way to more great learning opportunities. My mentor teacher has shown me some wonderful resources that I am going to use in the future, and we have discussed a little bit about the lesson I will be teaching in the second rotation. I told my mentor teacher that I would keep in contact the few weeks that I am back on campus, and he even offered and said that I could come to sit in on his other classes if I wanted to these next few weeks, just to see the different grade levels, the different students, and the different types of content being taught. The students this week were definitely ready for fall break, and today I taught a lesson to end the unit on Technology and Media and its relation to Sociology. I created a lesson that would engage students and it involved media censorship throughout history, whether video games are violent, cause aggression, or bad behavior, along with understanding the differences between correlation and causation. I c...
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Week 3 of Practicum at Burris Laboratory School

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 This week has been a little stressful in the classroom. Mostly for my mentor teacher, as he has been having to switch his lesson plans around to fit the needs of the students. He had overplanned activities and lessons, and students did not get to where they were supposed to be by the end of the week. My mentor teacher is okay with this, but I could tell he was struggling to separate his personal life and mood from class this week. He was just as engaged with the lessons and students but seemed a bit more scattered. I was supposed to teach a lesson on Tuesday by myself, yet students did not get to do their Field Observation #2 for Sociology on Monday. Since they did not do that on Monday, due to the need to complete the survey, along with explaining the assignment, modeling how it would be completed, and giving examples, students did not complete the other parts of the lesson that were planned for Monday. Therefore, on Tuesday my mentor teacher decided to switch up the lesson and t...
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