This week was a really good week for me! I thought it would be pretty stressful considering I have a lot on my mind/plate with preparing to fully take over next week but it turned out to be a very good week, I would rate it as a 4 on the scale. I say this because, the students are adjusting to me being their leader in the classroom which REALLY helped take a lot of the stress away. I learned even more this week of exactly how to manage Kindergartners and I am learning that you have to break everything down into small steps. You cannot tell them too much at once- it overwhelms them. Transitions were a biggie for me and I finally feel like I am really mastering them this week and it is making me feel so much more confident in my classroom management skills. I am getting them from subject to subject and place to place without any chaos and most of the time with NO TALKING! This felt like a huge accomplishment for me. My CE is letting me handle the classroom management already so that next week when I fully take over, I will already have been in charge of the classroom management. It really has went much better than I had anticipate and only a few times did I have to move students down on the behavior chart (which were minor disruptions). It really has boosted my confidence to know that I can actually manage a classroom of twenty-two five to six year olds on my own with few minor problems- it felt like quite the accomplishment! So, I was pleasantly surprised by this and I hope you all are having positive experiences with behavior management too! 

Next week,  I feel I will be even better prepared to make quick decisions and judgments on small management issues in the classroom because I have spent so much time seeing how my CE handles these situations and I have had some experience making these decisions myself. My short-term efforts are still aligned with my long-term goals of beginning my ten-weeks of complete takeover next week and doing so as smoothly as possible. I am learning that even though I have planned my lessons a week ahead of time, I need to spend more time looking over them the night before so that I don’t have to spend time when I come in in the mornings puling up all of my flip charts and materials. I spent time downloading everything I need for next week and putting it all in one folder so preparing for the days ahead can be much more time-efficient. I found this week that the subjects that I was more confident teaching went so much more smoothly and I was able to see how the subjects that I was more excited about were the subjects I was able to get students much more excited and engaged in. So, I learned that my enthusiasm and confidence while teaching has a HUGE impact on student learning. This directly shapes my approach next week and shows me that even if I don’t feel completely confident about something, I cannot let it show. Kindergartners rely on enthusiasm a lot so I will bring that to the table in everything I teach. 

For next week, my first logical step is to look over the plans and make sure I have everything in place to have a successful week and there is not anything I need that I don’t have. Also, I am going to spend the workday (when I am not in professional development) lesson planning so I can go ahead and get ahead (hopefully by a week). I would share the advice with upcoming student teachers to try and be at least a week ahead in planning so that you don’t feel overwhelmed. Also, OVERPLAN! You don’t want to feel worried that you aren’t going to have anything in place for students to do if a lesson ends early!

I spent a lot of time analyzing writing benchmarks that we completed this week and it let me see the writing skills that some of my students are lacking. I built in writing workshop practice into my literacy rotations for next week and will continue to in the future because of the data I analyzed this week. I was able to make that instructional decision based on what was lacking in those benchmarks. 

I also feel I am growing in different areas of the teacher candidate standards: 

1a. Teachers lead in their classrooms- This week I felt much more like the leader in the classroom than I ever have. I can tell that the students are responding to me as the leader because I am working to ensure my classroom management skills match my CE! I feel like I really had a lot of growth in this area over the last few weeks which I am proud of. 

 2d: Teachers adapt their teaching for the benefit of students with special needs: Differentiation was a big focus for me this week because it in an area I feel I need constant improvement in because it is a challenge to meet the needs of all students but it is so important. So, I spent more time learning about and understanding the needs of my students this week and worked to improve my differentiation strategies in my lessons to be tailored to each individual student. 

3d. Teachers make instruction relevant to students- I worked this week to make even more text-to-self connections for students because I am finding that is an essential part of comprehension. They are also so much more engaged when they can make those connections. I was intentional about having those discussions with students and giving them opportunities to connect to the characters in our stories this week and with the events in the story. 

4e. Teachers help students develop critical-thinking and problem-solving skills- This week I was very intentional about asking students deeper-level thinking. I stayed away from the one-answer questions (especially in math) and focused more on asking why? How do you know? Explain the strategy you used? Why did you use this strategy? I found it really helps to deepen their understanding of the concept. 

5a. Teachers analyze student learning- I am becoming much more intentional about taking my student’s work and using it to guide my next instructional steps in a much more focused way. 

This week, I started to look heavily at my philosophy of education and edTPA requirements. My CE had some really good conversations about what I can do for the Task 4 in math and we are deciding for sure early next week what I will be focusing on for Tasks 1-3 in literacy and when a good time is for me to go ahead and teach my progressions (we are thing mid February). Any support I can get with edTPA from my supervisor will be very helpful to me (which everyone has been great with information on that thus far) and I know my CE would like support as well as she helps me through the edTPA process.