What I learned this week.

As an education class, we are able to reflect openly and honestly about how our time in the classroom is going. This has proven to be very important and helpful when faced with the challenge of "what do I do when this happens" and receiving direct feedback to our questions. This class has been a lot of looking at ways to manage your classroom and incorporate the most effective teaching strategies.

In the classroom that I am observing, I have not been able to witness any learning centers set up around the room, so I did a little bit of research on how to best manage those. This link leads you to 5 tips on managing learning centers. These 5 tips walk the teacher through a few steps of how to plan, prepare and lead using learning centers. Often times I am unsure of a best way to make these learning centers effective and useful for learning, but this link has helped me find a variety of ideas to use when it is my turn to prepare lessons for learning. I chose to research learning centers for 4th grade math because many students in my class have a hard time understanding many of the concepts introduced to them. I saw test scores from the class and my CE has shared with me that math is going to be an important focus this year. These learning centers allow them to have different practice, work together to develop answers and move around in the classroom,

One opportunity I did have in the classroom was to work with the students while solving problems in rounding numbers. The lesson moved quickly and some of the students took off with flying colors. Others; not so much. I got to talk to my CE about differentiation and she shared with me a few things she does in order to make sure she has prepared her students in the correct way and sets them up for success. The students had a test on a book they read in class and she gave two of her students entirely different tests with half of the number of questions and with a reading passage that was on a first grade reading level. She then put them at another table so they could easily access her if they had questions.

It's on days like these where observing in the same classroom is wonderful. It is beneficial to your learning and shows you what is expected of you. We know this because of the standards the CE model for you and the NCPTS. Days like these make teaching look good. Every time I leave the classroom, I feel a little more fulfilled a lot more confident in what I am getting a degree in.

To more learning,
Brittany Kertesz