2 posts tagged “improvement”

Three things that I need to improve upon:
1) classroom management - consistency, swiftness of punishment, taking as little time away from instruction to deal with discipline as possible.

2) differentiating instruction - teaching to the top third, middle third, and bottom third of the class all with the same lesson

3) enjoying teaching (and life, in general)

One thing that I think I do well as a teacher is that I keep the kids busy and working.  I took a great amount of pleasure hearing my kids say things like "you tryin' to kill us with all this WORK!"  Keeping the kids involved in work and activities from bell to bell definitely helped with my classroom management, and I will continue to make sure we waste as little time as possible in class.

I still feel that there I have a great deal of improving to do before I can say there is only one thing left to improve on.  I know that this blog is about the single thing I most need to improve on, but I feel like its nearly the same questions.  Singling one aspect of my teaching out as the worst is difficult.  So many choices.  I'll pass on things like varying my questioning techniques and classroom management (I haven't really had much practice in this, so it very well could be awful...) and talk about lesson planning.

I have noticed that I have become increasingly efficient in my lesson planning, and am able to write better less in far less time than was required a month ago.  However, I still think that it takes me quite a bit of time and would like to reduce this as much as possible, without sacrificing the quality of the lesson.  The quality of the lesson, is the other issue I would like to improve on.  This, too, is better than a month ago.  However, there is certainly room for improvement.  I need to differentiate my modes of instruction more and find ways to students to teach themselves while I watch.  I'm still stuck in the "college lecture" format of teaching, which is terrible, especially when you're not teaching college.  Eighth graders can take about 10 minutes of lecture before coma.  I've also fallen into a rut of showing video clips in almost every lesson.  While I think that using media is generally good, I need to mix it up more and include different forms of media.  Beyond the fact that I think variety is better than the same thing day after day, I  don't even know what kinds of resources I'll have at Chastain, so I can't rely on having a projector.