Student Practice Reflection - Day 3 (Classroom Management)

     February 1st was my 3rd day at the Trilingual School of Warsaw. I challenged myself to grow from my experiences on day 2 and I feel like I was relatively successful at doing so. I feel like every day that I spend at the school has a huge impact on me as a teacher, which makes me very proud and excited to see how I grow over the next couple of months.

    The thing I struggled with on my last day was my confidence as a teacher, especially when it came to assessing students' work. I feel like I am already getting more comfortable with doing such things. Already today I felt much more confident sitting down with students, reading their writing, and correcting their mistakes. I think what caused a lot of doubts for me was the fact that the student I assessed last class had an incredibly high level of English for a 4th grader. I think that's what shocked me a bit and made me feel insecure about my own skills. Now that the shock is gone, and I also noticed the differences levels of English in the class, I feel much more prepared for the challenge. However, assessing students, who have a slightly lower lever of English can be challenging too. Sometimes it is very hard to comprehend the text they wrote and it is necessary for me to read the whole thing twice. The first time I correct the problems with vocabulary, tenses, spelling errors, and even issues reading the kids' writing. Once the words themselves are comprehensible, the second time I correct the meaning and sentence structure. I wonder, if this is an issue only for me, since I am still inexperienced, or others have this issue as well. I hope in the future I can be quicker with my assessments, but for now I think reading twice is the best option to ensure I do not miss any mistakes.

Classroom Management

    I also wanted to talk about the classroom management techniques I observed today. First of all, the teacher reprimands or asks a student to not do something verbally. When the behavior repeats however, the teacher came up with a very innovative way to "punish" the student - the 'traffic light' system. On one of the walls in class there is a sheet with the names of all the students, where they get either green dots for commendable behavior or red dots for poor behavior. The teacher walks over to the sheet silently and adds a red dot for the student, who is misbehaving. This way the class does not get disrupted, but the student still knows there will be consequences for their repeated actions. Once a student gets 3 red lights, all the breaks on a given day are taken away from them. For example, during the time the kids go outside to play, that student has to sit on a bench and read. Also, if a lot of red dots accumulate, the student's parents will be notified. I personally like this method, because it is simple, clear, does not disrupt the lesson order, but it gives clear signals to the student. The punishment is also not old-fashioned or damaging to the child, as they sometimes used to be, but rather taking away a benefit, which I believe works much better. I also observed other methods in different classrooms. For example, in one of the 5th grade classrooms, they utilize the 'time-out corner' method. If a kid misbehaves, they have to go to the corner and do some additional work - searching a new word in the dictionary, copying it into the notebook along with the meaning, and writing sentences with it. The more times the misbehavior happens, the more words the student has to write, until it is necessary to call the parents. I personally like this method less, because it disrupts the learning of the student. They have to do separate work, but do not learn with the rest of the class. On the other hand, it does allow them to be removed from the rest of the class, which might bring more peace and let the naughty student cool off. This method has its pros and cons, but I think I personally am more of a fan of the first one - it's more low-key, but the punishment is something that the kids will want to avoid much more, which should be the goal.

    Day 3 was another amazing day for me. I got to work on my assessment skills and observe the classroom management at the Trilingual School of Warsaw. I am excited to see what the next days bring and what challenges I will be able to combat next. I keep saying this, but I truly feel like every single day has been very transformative for me as a teacher, which makes me excited to see what lies ahead.