Week 16 Check-In Reflection

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1.  After spending these weeks in content classrooms, what would you assess as the major challenges facing teachers in today's classrooms?  (Please list as many as you have identified and provide a brief explanation of the challenge.)

2.  What would you assess as the major challenges facing students in today's classrooms?  What obstacles to learning did you see in your students?

3.  Considering your professional growth into the role of a professional educator, what would you identify as important to focus on in the second field experience?  Please consider this question from three perspectives--the what of teaching (content knowledge), the how of teaching (pedagogical knowledge), and the dispositions necessary to be an effective teacher.


Now that I am wrapping up my time in the classroom with my mentor teacher and my students, I have been able to assess and see the different challenges that teachers are facing in the classroom today. I feel like these are good reasons because I often hear my mentor teacher say that the administration changing curriculum and the ways teachers have to teach every few years is taxing mentally and physically. Having to make the students change their learning strategies for a new curriculum is disrupting the students learning process. My mentor teacher also notes that there is so much being pushed onto students to complete due to school standards from the administration and from the state that students who are already lost at the basic level and expected to keep up with all of the changes are becoming even more lost. 

  • teacher burnout/ exhaustion
  • unprepared 
  • dealing with student behavior
  • curriculum changes due to administration
  • teacher shortage/ trouble getting substitutes to watch classes
  • technological difficulties 
  • difficulties accommodating every student's needs every day 
  • student engagement/ classroom management
Challenges/ obstacles facing students
  • attention span
  • engagement 
  • interpersonal relationships 
  • behavior issues
  • literacy and fluency 
  • comprehension of content
  • willing to put in the work/ believe in themselves that they can do the work
For the next field rotation experience, I know that I need to work on historical content knowledge, which I feel can constantly be worked on, along with content pertaining to education. Pedagogically speaking, I know that I can work on classroom management, grouping, and how I assert students and work with them to always build up teacher-student relationships. Finding my teacher identity and how I want to control and run my own classroom as a professional educator. Dispositionally, I think to be more effective, I need to incorporate more problem-solving and thinking which I think can go hand in hand with the appropriate use of technology. This can be a way for students to become more engaged in class since they are always using technology. 


Overall, I can't express how much I have grown and realized where I need to grow and make room for improvements next practicum. I also can't express how much I have enjoyed working with my students and seeing their growth throughout the semester, and learning all about them. 

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