Field Experience Reflection 2

I feel like the past few weeks at my field experience have been going great. We have been working through conflict resolution and communication types the last week, and are now moving into tobacco and nicotine products. I am still experiencing high levels of stress due to the amount of work on my plate right now, but feel like teaching and assisting in the classroom has been going really well. A success that I had recently was teaching and recording my first solo lesson plan. I have been teaching almost every day following my host teacher’s curriculum, but it was very rewarding to create a lesson plan and implement it for our new unit. My students did really well with following the lesson, put forth great effort on the activities and most reached their learning target. It was rewarding to see that all my effort in researching and creating this lesson plan paid off in a meaningful way for my students.

A challenge that I have been facing is that my host teacher’s curriculum and day to day lessons differ from what is expected at Brockport. There are many days where students will work on one worksheet for the whole period. This is a sharp contrast to the lessons I prepare, as I follow the template we have used in our classes throughout this program which includes an anticipatory set, new content, skill development and an exit ticket. As a result, my lessons have a lot more packed into them than the students are used to, which can lead to moments where they lose focus. I have overcome this slowly by continuing to teach lessons up to our college’s standards, and students have slowly gotten used to this amount of work and developing skills for most lessons.

One question that comes to mind is if there are any strategies you all use to keep up student engagement. My students work really hard, but as 7th graders tend to do, they often lose focus near the tail ends of lessons. I have been thinking of incorporating short movement breaks in the middle of lessons and seeing if that makes a difference. Have any of you had any success with that? I hope everyone else is doing well and getting through all this work!