Reflecting upon my First Classroom Experience as a Student Teacher

Reflecting upon my First Classroom Experience as a Student Teacher

Reflecting upon my first classroom experience as a student teacher, I experienced several celebrations and challenges. The achievements and challenges encouraged me because they pushed me beyond my comfort zone, and I have immensely grown as the teacher I desired to be. Therefore, it would not be right to only talk about the takeaways. Most importantly, the classroom experience taught me the essence of making mistakes. While I anticipated and expected that I would frequently create excellent lessons, have everything go easily, and explain everything just as planned, I really grew anxious when preparing my first lessons and lesson plans. This taught me the importance of accepting that tutors are never perfect. My students and teaching experience have taught me to learn from my mistakes instead of letting them bring me down. As a result, I learned from my students and the cooperating teacher that having an open mind helped me to change, develop, and be able to think critically. Undeniably, all these lessons made my teaching experience much more fun and inspiring.

Several factors impacted my students’ learning and, ultimately, high-success learning. These factors included purpose, objectives, instruction, assessment, and instruction. The teaching objectives were the most important factors that resulted in high success or mastery. Teaching objectives set the pace for students to learn. I ensured the objectives were short-term, measurable, specific, and observable. Therefore, students could identify the needed skills, attitudes, and abilities they were required to gain. The purpose of learning and objectives was to help set expectations for learners, guide the learning processes, and help my student focus their minds on exams.

In contrast, assessments primarily focus on what learners know, what they can do, and the values they will have when they graduate. Therefore, I used assessments such as standardized tests, quizzes, and oral tests for high-success students. I also used summative and formative assessments to assess the high-success learners. All these proved handy and helped me test and rate these learners’ success levels more effectively.

Effective planning and implementation of instruction could have led to student success because these two strategies help teachers strategically decide what the students will be taught and how they are to learn it. Most importantly, planning and implementing would have helped me to differentiate instruction to meet the needs of all learners, including those with disabilities and struggling or low-success learners. Effective planning of learning activities helped my students to recall concepts, follow presentations, and understand the importance of planning learning activities. Finally, I will ensure continued learning progression by training and allowing learners to evaluate their own learning and reflect on their progress. This way, they can identify their knowledge or skills deficiencies, set realistic goals, revise their work, and remain interested and motivated to learn.

Undoubtedly, my class had low-success students whose mastery levels were considerably low. These students could have a problem with English and maths objectives. One of the factors that negatively impacted the students’ learning was the instruction and assessments. The purpose and objectives were direct, read, and written on the board. Therefore, they were easy to achieve. However, the exceptional learners had diverse challenges that made them fail in assessments; either their disabilities were too extreme and interfered with their communication and writing skills, making it hard to effectively assess such learners. Even if I adjusted the assessment criteria, they still failed. Secondly, my instruction was not fully tailored to meet all the exceptional learners’ needs. I felt demoralized because I could not appropriately accommodate and handle learners with disabilities.

Nonetheless, I adopted several research-based methods of planning and teaching to continue enhancing these students’ learning in the future to impact them positively. These methods include cooperative learning and student-centered teaching approaches. Hallahan et al. say that cooperative and student-centered learning will be helpful to students as the interactive sessions and group learning will help them develop interpersonal relationships with their peers (p.89). This chance to discuss their ideas in small groups and get constructive feedback on those concepts will help build learners’ self-esteem, improve their judgment and emotional awareness, enhance flexible perspective, as well as gain additional vital skills that would benefit them even in the future.

I suggest redesigning my assessment criteria for future teaching to fit all learners—especially learners with disabilities or various disorders. In addition, the teaching curriculum should be redesigned so that for exceptional learners, the instruction curriculum is activity or play-based. This will enhance their understanding of content and even help them learn different skills such as problem-solving, collaboration, and communication skills. The objectives should not only be short, observable, and specific but should also align with the learner’s needs and be doable to mold learners’ skills. Finally, instruction to children or learners should encompass cooperative learning and student-centered learning approaches. The primary reason for suggesting these is that they will virtually and practically assist all learners in meeting their needs and gaining vital skills to help them in their future careers.

These suggestions will help students learn to work collaboratively while supporting and building each other, creating a safe and good learning environment that would improve their performance. Surprisingly, there are no suggestions for redesigning the current group of lessons or units. Concerning planning and teaching, school heads should make it mandatory for teachers to plan their lessons effectively before teaching. This will make learning more successful and effective because learners’ needs and lesson objectives will be met as planned. Hallahan et al. claim that poor planning results in disorganized work or lessons, making instruction ineffective (p.120). As such, successful teaching is achievable by effective planning and implementation. Remarkably, the teaching experience for this residency 1, especially teaching learners with exceptionality, was beneficial. Even though there were many challenges, I gained a lot. It helped fashion me into the courageous, patient, determined, organized, loving, and understanding teacher I have longed to be.

Work Cited

Hallahan, Daniel E., James M. Kauffman, and Paige C. Pullen. Exceptional Learners: An Introduction to Special Education: Pearson New International Edition. Pearson Higher Ed, 2013.

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This assignment is simply a reflection of your first experience within the classroom and how you plan to improve/build on your teaching in the future.

While the assignment is mostly focused on your experience teaching this semester, I DO want to hear about your overall experience within Residency I. How did the experience encourage/discourage you in your pursuit of becoming a teacher?

This paper should be a minimum of three pages!

Task:

Reflect on student learning and possible reasons for high or low success/levels of mastery. Discuss implications for future teaching and methods that you plan to seek to engage in to improve your performance as a teacher.