Discussion 6: what I have learned from my study teaching and seminar

          The student teaching practice and the seminar gave me insight view of being a teacher, and I have learned lots of strategies on teaching and managing a classroom. Good classroom management skills enable a teacher to give an effective teaching, and creating and implementing effective classroom rules and procedures ensures students learning. When students are engaged in various learning activities and follow the class procedure and rules, they will be able to learn the most. I also learned teaching strategies of using differentiated assessments during instruction and encouraging students’ learning. Good teachers not only use a variety of assessments, such as homework checking, asking questions while giving instructions, or giving different tests, to learn students’ learning status, they also make adaptations to help students, especially for the ones who have special needs, to access learning contents. My master teacher allowed students to get credit rewards by re-taking tests with similar questions after they study, and this strategy encouraged many students to learn more and understand each of test questions in order to get high scores of the course. The struggle students in the classroom also have the opportunities to study required materials of each chapter and pass the chapter tests besides to the regular classroom study in order to pass the Algebra II course. These classroom strategies can help students to focus on study in a positive learning environment.

            My student teaching experiences helps me prepared to be a teacher in my future classroom, and one of it had a strong impact on my teaching philosophy. That is: Each student learns in different way, and teacher needs to find the appropriate method to help his or her learning and never give up. One of my students was a senior, and at the beginning of my coming to the classroom, he was tardy for each class and never had homework. During the class, he always drew on a paper and did not follow the class directions. At the time of individual practice, I asked him whether he understood the class materials. When he answered to me that he did not know the learning contents and could not do the exercises and homework, I started to tutor him and checked his understanding in each class. I even asked him to come to classroom for help on his assignments during lunchtime. Since then, he started to work on his homework, and his daily quiz scores improved from 0 or 1 out of 10 to 4 or 5 out of 10. I gave him praise and encouraged him to participate class activities, and at the time of my leaving, he felt more confident and could join the class discussions. This experience inspires me that as a teacher, I will work with every student in my future classroom and find proper ways to help them accessing learning materials because everyone has the ability to learn with the teacher’s help.    

Discussion 4: Classroom management

"Classroom management is the most important factor governing student learning." (Wong, p80). During my student teaching, I have learned many classroom management techniques that lead students to focus on their learning. One strategy is cooperative learning. It is a good way to help students who are unmotivated or even disruptive. During the class, students were seated in groups, so they could share their studies and help each other. The unmotivated students often got their group members' reminders for their tasks, and the disruptive behaviors of students got reminded too. Another strategy is for the students who didn't do their homework. They were required to sit in special tables separated from other students. Not only did this allow the students to work on their homework while the rest of class were doing homework correction and discussion,  it also alerted the students to correct their inappropriate behaviors next time. The third strategy was used during instructions. My master teacher was able to involved as many students to follow her instruction as possible. She always asked questions for individual students to answer, especially for those who were distracted or did other things,  so the students were reminded to focus on their learning stuff. The forth strategy is encouraging students' good behaviors and create a positive learning environment. If all students in a group finished their homework or got full points for their quizzes, then all students would receive their awards for lollipops and be allowed to eat during the class. Therefore, effective teachers use various strategies to create well-managed classroom so that "1. Students are deeply involved with their work, especially with academic, teacher-let instruction. 2. Students know what is expected of them and are generally successful. 3. There is relatively little wasted time, confusion, or disruption. 4. The climate of the classroom is work-oriented but relaxed and pleasant." (Wong, p85).


Reference:
Wong, H.K., (1998). The first day of school: How to be an effective teacher

Socioeconomic status has huge impact on school and class culture

The economic situations of students' families have tremendous impact on the culture of the school. When the families of the students are poor and parents are struggling for their livings, they normally have No more time focusing on their children's school work, their performance in school and society, and their children's friends' impact. As a result, their students would be possible have bad behavior and low academic and other performance. On the other hand, if the parents are wealthy and value education, they would spend more time with their children for academics, extracurricular, and physical development. Therefore, students will be on correct track during their growth. That is why schools have different APIs in different areas.

Different assessments

Many assessments are very useful in helping teachers to check students' understanding for the learning materials. In my student teaching math class, three often used assessments are monitoring the students' homework corrections and providing explanations for the questions that they have difficulties to solve, asking questions during instructions to check their understanding for the new content study, and  giving short daily quiz to check if the students grasp the new learning materials. These assessments are very effective for finding students' weaknesses or confusions, so teacher can give appropriate help immediately. Through homework corrections, teacher can know exactly which concepts and math skills that students haven't grasped, so she or he can give instructions or modelings to clarify the problems. The teacher can also provide more exercises for students to practice. Asking questions are also an effective way to know whether  students are ready to move to next instruction. By daily quiz, teacher can clearly know the status of students' understanding of the new contents, so she or he can make decision on the teaching pace for re-teaching or moving on the next content learning.
For ELL or student with special needs, the teacher may need to modify the assessments. The teacher may use individual tutor for ELL instead of asking ELL questions publicly because of the language difficulties of the student. The teacher may use more mathematical expressions and less talking to help the student to understand the math concepts and skills. For the student with special needs, besides the teacher should often check the student' understanding privately, she or he can pair the student with a gifted student so that the partner can give the student learning help. Also, the teacher should communicate with the resource teacher of the student and learn the status of the student's study, and the teacher can also provide the student more time for finishing exercise and quiz so that the student can complete his or her task with less time pressure.
The assessment discussed in the Tomlison textbook is the way to assess students' knowledge by linking the content study with students' interest and their real lives. "One of the pleasures of teaching is the chance to introduce students to q world full of ideas and opportunities they've not yet discovered. Interest-based instruction can not only draw on and expand already existing student interests, but can help them discover new interest as well." (Tomlison, p 54). I feel like to use projects to connect the learning contents with students real world. For example, when I teach the knowledge of Exponential Functions, I can assign a project to let my students to search the data of world population in different period of time, analyze the data, and draw the conclusion to see whether the population growth is exponential from the human history. Through the project, students will feel useful of their math learning and have more interests for their future studies as well as making connections with different learning fields (math and human growth).

 Reference:
Tomlinson, C.A. (2001).  How to differentiate instruction in mixed-ability classroom.

School culture and the teacher's role

"Students want a safe, predictable, and nurturing environment."(Wong, p3). School culture has an important impact on students' lives and learning in schools. "The effective teachers spent time organizing and structuring their classrooms so that the students know what to do to succeed." (Wong, p3) And the most thing teachers to do is "Consistency." In the class of my student teaching, the students have class routine daily, so when they come to class, they know the first thing to do is to check homework with the keys on screen. They don't need teacher tell them what they should do, and they automatically take out their homework and start correction. This routine helps the students calm down and focus on their studies as soon as they get into the classroom. My master teacher also creates a rule to encourage the students to improve their learning. She said, if her students got low scores on their quizzes, they could show their understand by both correcting their mistakes and giving descriptions on why they got wrong, then they have chances to add more scores for their quizzes. As a result, whenever the students got wrong problems in quizzes, they would automatically do whatever the teacher said in order to get more scores. These rules are really helpful to develop students' good learning habits and improve their learning results. By the student teaching, I will learn more strategies about teacher's role on help fostering school's cultures.

Reference:
Wong, H.K., (1998). The first day of school: How to be an effective teacher

Fun in Mathematics: Welcome to my blog! My name is Hong Zhang, and I ...

Fun in Mathematics: Welcome to my blog!
 My name is Hong Zhang, and I ...: Welcome to my blog!  My name is Hong Zhang, and I am doing my student teaching in Los Alto High School now.
I am currently doing Math Algebra II teaching in the school, and students' grades are 9th to 12th. For the everyday class I was there, students did homework correction, took quiz, learned new materials, and practiced exercises. I helped them and graded quiz each day and found some of students' math foundations were weak. Both students wanted to learn and teachers wanted to help, but the time was short, even we used the time of the lunch and after school. It was really challenged for these struggle students to master math knowledge.

Welcome to my blog!
 My name is Hong Zhang, and I am doing my student teaching in Los Alto High School now.