Comprehensive Reflection
Review your goals for your student teaching experience. Provide documentation and discussion to support whether you did or did not accomplish your goals.
Student Teaching Goals
Reflection
I believe I set very realistic goals for myself. My goal of being open minded to students, teachers, and other professionals in the building was met by always having an open ear and open mind. I met with the music teacher a few different times to see what we could do during our classroom time to better help her out with the upcoming Christmas concert. We became pretty good acquaintances and at the end she made up this goody box for me that had books, worksheets, and lesson plans that she thought would help me out. I also volunteered to come back in December to help out with the Christmas program.
Also when I was being open minded with my students, I was able to learn more about them. One of my students that was having behaviors on a daily basis, wrote to me in a journal telling me a little about his home life and through different things we were able to get him a social worker and an adult mentor. His behaviors seemed to improve which made the days go much more smoothly for him and assignments were actually coming in. I learned through this process that there were many resources out there for extra help for students having a ruff time in school.
I made it a point to go to different classrooms and watch different teaching styles. This was a great opportunity to talk and get to know each teacher as an individual. I also would sit in the lounge on lunch break so I could get to know the other teachers and support staff through out the building that I never got to see on a regular basis. I was able to build networks with all different types of people.
Describe a meaningful experience that you had during your student teaching. Provide enough detail that the situation / issue comes alive for the reader. Discuss why this experience was meaningful to you and how you were changed as an educator.
At the end of the day in my end of the building, the teachers will go door to door to just chat with each other, or ask questions, or give each other a little laugh. My cooperating teacher was in a meeting and a fourth grade teacher from across the hall came to visit. She wanted to visit and see how my student teaching experience was going. I had a tough day that day with misbehaving students, fighting taking place on the play ground, and girls bickering back and forth. She chuckled and said there are going to be many days you feel like nothing you do makes a difference and will want to just pull your hair out, but then there will be those days that take the place of all the bad ones. She continued to tell me that a few years ago when she was teaching kindergarten, she picked up the Sunday paper and saw the speeches the valedictorians made at graduation. She recognized that the one girl was one of her students as a kindergartner so she began to read her speech. She then told me that her student talked about the one person that made a different in her life and she said her kindergarten teacher. As she was telling me this her eyes welled up with tears and said that you just never know when you are making a difference in a child’s life.
This was very meaningful to me because it was a reminder of no matter how bad a day is you could be making the world of difference to one child by just being there for them. I also thought this was very special because of the connection this teacher must have had with her students. When I am a teacher that is the type of things I want my students to walk away with and remember.