My Student Teaching Experience | The Overview.

I don't know what I was thinking I don't know what I was expecting I just know that I felt like that was drowning and I didn't know how to save myself hi guys it's putting on that welcome back to my channel in today's video I will be talking about my student teaching experience but before I start telling you about my student teaching experience as a whole I am going to tell you a little bit about the process that I took to get there so I went to the University of Arizona and I was part of their elementary education program so my program is four semesters long the first semester you have to do 30 hours of field work so that would place you in a classroom and you were just going into the surf so it was a very hands-on at all it was just more to get a feel of what the classrooms are like and also during that semester you took courses alike I think it took like developmental psychology into your education school in schooling in America what else did I take so like so long ago I can't remember but you basically just took education courses then moving on to the second semester of the program you were starting your field method so people methods are just classes that our focus and certain subjects so for example for my second semester that I'm talking about right now I took reading art social studies intro to the exceptional learner I think I don't know some other class that I can't remember off the top of my head I'm so sorry I thought it was pretty fresh in my mind but I guess not but yet you took like subject classes and on top of that you also had practicum so for practical you have to be in a classroom for a full day and also for a half day every week cause I'm editing this video I totally forgot to mention that for my methods courses we would have like a big event remember for each class that would have a benchmark a center for arts and math and all those things and usually it would have to deal with a case study and you would do those in the classroom so for my case study for writing I have to work with one students one-on-one for the whole semester and then write a paper about it so I would work with a student in my practicum or for my science benchmark I'd have to do a certain amount of lessons and record them and then reflect on them so I had to do those in my practicum as well so for my second semester I was placed in a second grade classroom and I was also paired up with a buddy for my cohort so everybody has buddies in the classroom at first I was a little bit nervous about this because I didn't really know the girl that much but in a mentor working really well because we became really close friends and it was also cool because you got to co-teach which is something that I feel you don't get a lot of experience with except in the situation Center moving on to my third semester of my program I was placed in a fourth year classroom for practicum so again we still have to do a full day and a half day but this time we were in the classroom by ourselves we were not with a buddy so this was different because I got more practice teaching and planning by myself then I did the semester before I met semester I took science PE assessment writing I think and sheltered English immersion moving on to a fourth semester of my program that's when I did my student teaching so ideally the way the program works is you get to teach with one of your two mentor teachers that you did your practicum with so technically I had a choice between second grade or fourth grade however my second grade mentor teacher was not an option because I was actually here last semester teaching because she was going to retire so that meant that I was left with fourth grade and to be honest with you I didn't really want to student teach with fourth grade because I am really really interested in the primary grades not so much in the intermediate grades however I was still considering it because I loved them mentor teacher and I loved the class as well but my heart was there in primary grades so because of that I submitted a request to student teach at the school that I had been working out for three years for their after-school program I wanted to soon teach with the first-grade teacher because she is amazing in half phenomenal like classroom management skills so I felt like I could learn a lot from her I submitted my request and I was really hopeful that it would get approved because when I turn it in their reactions of the people in charge were pretty positive so I assumed that I would get placed there but I reserve my resource adenosine denied because the school was too and I put air closer on that because I know if other student teacher so our student teaching like even farther than my school would have been and some were even teaching in another city so I don't really know what happened there I feel like I might have had to do it effects at the school with a charter school so honestly I was super super super upset about the fact that my request was denied and I tried to fight it and it didn't work out so ultimately I was told that I was going to continue to be in the fourth grade classroom that I was asked and don't see my student teaching there because it just kind of seemed to work better for them and my teacher wanted to sit a teacher and I was already comfortable the kids already knew the kids and I knew the teacher so at this point I was like okay fine cool I'm going to see a teacher fourth grade at least I know now and then things changed again so they came when we got our official placements so one of the program coordinators came to our cohort class and she passed out like a paper said who you were student teaching with in my cohort we all had like the little cliques which was very weird so I was sitting with my group of friends and we all opened our placements together and they were all in the same school except for me she mind surprised I was not student teaching in 4th grade as I was told instead I was student teaching in 1st grade at a completely different school that no one in my cohort was student teaching at so I felt completely blindsided by this information because literally like a few days before that I was told that I was going to student teaching fourth grade so that made me think maybe my mentor teacher didn't want me after all so then I went to my practicum and my mentor teacher was under the impression that I thought the placement that I requested because I was in place with her but then I explained to her what happened and then she was confused because she had requested me for a student teacher and we didn't really know what happened so she asked so my mentor teacher ended up talking to the principal and asking what happened and she basically told her that because she hadn't been teaching as a district for three years she couldn't have a certain teacher even though she had been teaching for 4 plus years and that's the requirement to host a teacher my mentor teacher did not buy that however so she calling HR to verify the palutena policy and turns out it wasn't so I don't know I guess she just didn't want her to have a same teacher so after the whole like shock confusion stages were off I contacted my new cooperating teacher right away so I emailed her asking if there was a time when I could come in and meet her she didn't even leave asked for like a week and a half and I was starting to freak out a little bit because I started thinking that maybe she didn't even want us to interest her because there were situations like that in the program so I was a little bit scared so I am in a forwarding her the initial email just kind of checking in to see if she got it or not then she emails me back right away saying that she completely missed the email and then she told me when I could go in so I ended up going in on a Monday because that's when I could get out early from practicum with permission and she had time so I went to meet her and we just sat in her classroom and talked that students were not there because they were in special but I couldn't help appeal that that wasn't a right placement for me I feel like we just didn't connect as my fortune mentor teacher and I did and that was a little bit alarming to me I have a few friends that have had a horrible state teaching experience and it was because they and their quadrant teacher did not get along so it's kind of scared that that would happened to me because we weren't connecting I left that meeting just feeling kind of uneasy about my placement but I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt and I asked if I could go in a few days after that before the semester ended I also wanted to meet the students because I didn't want to show up the first day of student teaching with them not knowing who I was so that's why I wanted to make sure that I went into the classroom at least three times before a semester ended and even with those visits I still felt like it wasn't the right place for me because I felt like my teaching style and her teaching style were completely different so I I don't know I just can't emphasize enough how like not confident about my placement I was I would always tell my boyfriend like how pretty sad I was that my student teaching experience would be a bad one because of it so now let's fast-forward to the first day of student teaching and that's actually a half-day because we had our orientation in the morning that we had our lunch break and then we could go to our sites to officially start student teaching so the first half of our orientation was just like the basics like expectations due dates and important deadlines and whatnot then we also got to meet our supervisors so we got to meet a supervisor and also of other student teachers that she was managing I remember I remember going to lunch with my little group of friends and they were all super excited by student teaching and I wasn't I honestly was not excited at all it was all so sucky feeling when we were leaving that they were all going to the same school and I wasn't so I get to my site and again it's a Monday so students were not there it was just me my cooperating teacher and as soon as I walked into the classroom I see her name on the board and then right under her name was my name justice big and that small gesture made me feel a lot more at ease because it made me feel wanted in the classroom so we do sit down and we're talking a little bit about our Christmas breaking whatnot and then she pulls out a planner she had actually gotten me a happy planner I think this protis call from michaeles I believe and it's a really cute planner and she got it for me to help me with planning when I had full take over when I first met her she has shown me how she planned and she used little planners and I remember commenting on how effective I thought that looked and that's what she ended up getting me a planner for myself and she didn't ask how to do that at all I know that my other friends did not get a planner from their cooperating teacher the fact I should give that and she didn't have to meant a lot to me and it made me feel so much better about my placement and my negative feelings about my placement started fading away instantly after that my cooperating teacher also gave me two drawers or cur like drawer units for me to have my stuff in and I don't know it made me feel more part of the classroom as that make sense so a few days after student teaching started we had a meeting so it was my supervisor at my cooperating teacher and myself we just sat down and talked about when I would have observations and when I would have my midterm and my final so we scheduled them all out and we also planned out the progression of my whole takeover so what we plan for was for me to take up one subject each week so for example I think it was after the second week I would start teaching writing then the week after that I would be doing writing and math and then after that I would be doing writing math and reading and so on and so forth until I had full control of the classroom however I do not know why we ended not following into the progression what ended up happening is that she taught the whole time up until the first day of my full takeover I would teach when I had observation so when I had my writing observation my math observations I'd be the one planning for that and teaching it but other than that she would basically be teaching the whole time except for daily 5 because we would have to meet with the teacher center so I would have one group and she would have another group every day essentially what I did up until their full takeover was just kind of help citizen either help or take simonne.fuge that needed help one thing that I did a lot was work with us one student had special needs I think she was the only one in the classroom that had like more severe special needs and I was constantly with him trying to make sure that he wasn't left behind had six scheduled observations and the first one and then I'm not going as planned either this is kind of a theme with my student teaching like things did not go as planned but I just kind of went with it so for my first observation I thought I was supposed to be teaching math and my cooperating teacher also thought that so I planned her math at like 1a class and my supervisor showed up that day at nine o'clock and I was like during like guided reading time and then just being my guide where you can lesson that I was going to do anyway it ended up being a really really good lesson and they got really good feedback on it however not all my observations want super smooth and we're like awesome I think is my second observation that went horribly horribly wrong like I don't know what I was thinking I don't know what I was expecting I didn't know that I felt like that was drowning and I didn't know how to save myself for that observation I was going to be doing a writing lesson however we have to reschedule it last minute originally it was going to be a few days before Valentine's Day but I don't know why my supervisor couldn't make it that day so she asked if she could come on Valentine's Day and I said yes because I don't know I didn't see anything wrong with it if I could redo it again I would still say yes I don't regret saying yes to Valentine's Day but I do regret how I planned for it so I ended up lying this really cute activity on Teachers Pay Teachers and ultimate hiding with what we were learning and it was just going to be such a good lesson in my head in my head it was going to be perfect but it wasn't I think I just had way too much going on and my expectations were not clear whatsoever so the kids were asking questions constantly they did not know what they were supposed to do and I feel like I didn't you know what they were supposed to do because things were so out of control it was insane my cooperating teacher was trying to answer as many questions as she could help me out but it was just a bad bad lesson or for observations I did have like conferences with my supervisor right after so for the conference she did note that it was not a great lesson and she can I just ask me where I thought it went wrong but she did give me the benefit of the doubt because it was Valentine's Day and honestly the kids were super super hyper because they were super excited to pass out their Valentine's cards but that wasn't the whole reason why my awesome went bad luckily the observations after that went pretty well so I have nothing to worry about so I do want to talk a little bit about how involved I was in my student teaching I know there are some student teachers out there where they do with the bare minimum so like they'll get there when they have to get there like less ar8 and then the leave as soon as they can leave me on the other hand I did more than L supposed to I feel I just wanted to like immerse myself in that environment as much as I could like to learn as much as I could the contract time for teachers was like a 15 or a 20 but I would always get there at 8:00 if not earlier and the time for teachers to leave was I think is like 3:15 but I would always stay until like 4:30 or 5:00 and honestly because I would always stay so long I didn't even know the exact contract time my cooperating teacher was part of the epical program so she tutored kids from kinder and first grade so that meant that she had to stay until at least 4:30 so I would typically stay with her just to help out just I don't know I kind of wanted to eventually because I would always be there I was able to get a job as after-school program staff so that was kind of cool my incorporating teacher was also part of the Leadership Committee so whenever she had meetings I would also go with her after parent-teacher conferences some students were given the option to receive tutoring before and after school me and my cooperating teacher were switched off and tutoring those students even though I technically didn't have to but again I wanted to like immerse myself as much they could and like the lack of the teacher so I just wanted to mention that real quick before I start talking about my full takeovers so month will takeover it started the day we came back from Spring Break planted that way because we thought it'd be nice to have that week break and then for me to start it is kind of made sense to us at the time and like I mentioned before the progression to my student teaching school takeover was not smooth whatsoever in fact it was very like abrupt before spring break my cooperating teacher was teaching full time and then after I was teaching full time that's why I like the week in between was like very important to us so during spring break I remember planning a ton and making a ton of different resources so one thing we thought was missing in the classroom was activities for skips to do when they are done with their work specifically what series would be done with map or in assignments they would be able to draw and the way I saw it students were rushing through work to be able to draw so I wanted to be able to implement something where they would be doing something fun but still academic and was related to what they were learning so during spring break I bar laminator and a ton of like a strobe rice paper and I made a lot of math task cards so each set had skills that we were learning or skills that we had to relearn but I thought my unit reinforcement unfortunately I don't have those math task cards anymore I did leave them with my cooperating teacher and I ended up losing the files what kind of sucks I was very very fortunate that my cooperating teacher gave me complete freedom to teach how I wanted to so I didn't have to teach the same way that she taught she let me do what works best for me so like I mentioned earlier in the video our teaching styles are very different so she kind of stayed with what teacher manual said to you and I would kind of make it my own so for example for phonics there were tons where it called for sitting them at the carpet and she was segment words and the students had to call back what the word was as a whole I did end up trying out how she talked for a little bit but I felt like if it worked for me so I ended up doing different things I ended up implementing a lot of movement in my lessons because I wanted to keep my students engaged something else that I did differently than my cooperating teacher was that I collected their math work so I started collecting their exit tickets and I was craving this and I was grading them every day I wanted to collect them not only to check for understanding but also to see how well I was teaching the concept is that makes any sense but an honestly though is really really helpful for me because I was able to see if students were getting it and I was able to see who needed extra help and who was like completely not getting it at all so another memorable thing for my student teaching experience was a PLC observation so the school that I was at had PLC observations once a month so the next scheduled observation just happened to be in the middle of my student teaching full take over so before we had the observation we had a meeting with the other first-grade teacher and an instructional coach so the instructional coach just told us to write down everything that we were doing in the lesson so for example if I was writing something on the board then the other first grade teacher was supposed to write she was writing something on the board so every single time I would do something she would write it down and I would do the same for her when I was serving her so we taught in economics lesson it was going to be the introduction to the whole unit so I remember starting my lesson with a video about a lemonade stand and then we discussed the video and I introduced like goods and services then we talked more about gifts and services and we made an inquiry board so I wrote down any questions or comments that the students had about it cannot and I posted them on the inquiry board then after that I asked students to come up with a business so some of them came up with like a hot dog stand or a donut shop or like a Pokemon Girl store it was just like a bunch of different random things so unlike a sticky note like a big sticky note they drew a picture of their business and they wrote down what their business would it be I know it's not like a lot but it honestly didn't take that much time and I thought it was a really good introduction because after that we started doing more things with their business so we ended up categorizing them as you could some services and then they ended up making a print ad for their business and then they recorded a commercial for their business so I filmed their commercial in front of a green screen then I went home and I edit it every single one of those 27 videos so I'm a total time match with what they were talking about so if someone was talking about a construction company I would have liked construction trucks in the background if that make sense it was towards the very end of my school takeover actually the last day of my full takeover is when I had like a viewing party for the commercials that we filmed so I reached out to parents and my cooperating teacher ended up inviting the principal the magnet coordinator the counselor is a special ed teacher and her TA so classroom was pretty packed because a lot of parents ended up showing up which I did not expect what I was really happy with so we played each commercial on the SMART Board and after each commercial the students had to tell me whether it was a good or service that was being advertised so they had like a little paddle board that said good on one side and service from the other side so after each commercial they would hold other paddle and then I would take a few students to tell me why it was a good or while to service and I did that mostly as like an informal assessment and that made like the last day of my student teaching like the perfect end to it actually the very coordinator came up to me like some other time after that and told me that that was the best lesson he has seen the permison teacher so that made me feel really good about the whole experience after my full takeover all is done I still have to be in the classroom for three weeks because I had to be in the classroom for 75 full days so when my full takeover was done I went back to just kind of helping students with me to help or just making copies and stapling things and filing things because really there was not much to anymore so now I'm going to talk about something a little bit more personal that happened here my student teaching but I feel like I should talk about so during the last two weeks of my student teaching my grandma was very sick she was in and out of hospitals very very often the second to last day of my student teaching my grandma was more sick than she had been some of that ended up telling me that I should go home either that night or the next day I decided to go home that night and come back the same night the last day of my student teaching was a really really great day it was just filled with like laughter and joy and happiness and so much love a lot of those students were giving notes and some of them even brought me presents and my cooperating teacher gave me a huge basket of like crayons and like scissors and all these little things that like a teacher may need which I thought would look super super sweet and it was just such a great day so a little bit after lunch I was just paying out the kids helping them with math and I received a phone call I have a Fitbit charge too so whenever I have like a text or a phone call and like buzzes a little bit and it tells me like who it was from so I looked at my watch real quick and it was my cousin so I kind of thought maybe she was calling to see both going to go back home and she could run with me or something like that so I ignored it there are humans later I got a phone call from my cousin again and I ignored it again because I was in the classroom and then she called me again so that's when I thought something's up so I asked my cooperating teacher if I could make a call and I stepped out of the classroom and I called her back in as soon as she said hello I could hear it in her voice that something was wrong and turns out my grandma had just passed away and she was telling me that she was about to head out that way and if I wanted her to pick me up but I decided not to I started to finish off the day because it was my last day and I couldn't just leave so so I kind of took a minute to myself and I had a few like deep breaths and I pulled myself together and I went back into the classroom and I tried my best to hide the fact that something tragic had just happened in my family because I didn't want to upset my students I mean they were ready to set enough that it was my last day so I didn't want to give him something else to like be upset over and I also did not southern cooperating teacher so I actually don't even know she knows what happened that day or not so I kind of wanted to share this because it was part of my student teaching experience that not everybody experiences and I hope not everybody experiences but it was important because I was able to take a situation that was unplanned for and was very very unfortunate and deal with it in a way where I could still do my job so I know that there's going to be times in my teaching career where things are going to happen and I'm going to have to deal with it so that situation showed me that I am able to separate like my personal life to my professional life so that was pretty much my student teaching experience and honestly it was a fantastic absolutely fantastic experience my initial gut feeling about my placement completely changed dramatically if I could go back and redo my student teaching I don't think it would change anything about it because it was just so amazing I felt like I learned so much I learned so much for my cooperating teacher and she was so supportive about everything honestly I don't think I could have ever asked for a better cooperating teacher and I'm super super glad that thinks and then up working motivated even though at the time it seemed like everything was going wrong like leading up to my student teaching because everything was constantly changing everything really does happen for a reason and I'm glad that I did so there is a for today's video and hope you guys enjoyed it and if you did please give it a thumbs up also don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already and let me know in the comments below what other videos you would like to see from me in the future I will see you in my next one bye

Channel: That One Happy Classroom

Views: 20,535

Rating: 4.9028339 out of 5

Keywords: Teacher, Teacher Vlog, A Day in the Life of a Teacher, student teaching, my student teaching experience, #iteachtoo, iteachtoo, kindergarten

Id: 51Lgbqf3RfI

Length: 25min 51sec (1551 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 08 2017