This program was my first exposure to teaching, and through it I have learned so much. The biggest thing being that as a teacher, you’re never going to be perfect. There will always be things you wish you would’ve worded differently or things you wish you you would've done, and that’s okay. Being able to reflect upon my own teaching experiences as well as receive constructive criticism from my peers and instructors is a valuable skill I’ve developed over time. This helps me recognize what I can do differently the next time and my peers’ feedback helps me recognize aspects I might've missed or not seen myself. The second major skill I built on was group management. Personally, this was my first time working with K-5TH graders and working with groups of this age group which created difficulties I had never encountered before. Managing the behavior of eight to ten kids while still trying to teach was challenging, and even more challenging was trying to figure out what each individual student responded to the most. Some students would require just a warning or a chat to figure out the root of their difficult behavior, but others wouldn’t listen no matter what I tried. Learning how to balance the concept of positive reinforcement with attention to negative behavior is something I am still working on and will continue to improve upon over time.
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There were other approaches I learned to effectively manage a group, and they include how to refocus the attention of my students using a simple attention-getting technique like clapping, how to keep the attention of my students once I had it, how to give complete directions before starting an activity, and how to kindly reinforce our group agreements that we set at the beginning of the day. Another consistent lesson that we often came back to at the end of every lesson was how to frame our whole day around our learning outcomes so the day was a complete, cohesive lesson rather than a fragmented lesson with many parts. This was important for our nature education curricula because each grade focused on a specific habitat with activities that helped teach students about the different processes within each habitat, but it was ultimately up to us to make sure they understood the goal of the lesson we laid out. We did this by aligning our activities with learning outcomes that we set at the beginning of our curriculum process. This is also an ongoing learning process, but I now know how much effort it takes to create careful transitions and thoughtful reiteration of the learning material to create a holistic framing that would embody the main concepts of our curriculum.
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