It Takes Time

This was my mid term review week! I was super glad to have this review this week as I confidently feel as if this was my best week yet. My lessons went well all week and we accomplished everything planned but this had a small amount to do with it. When teaching this week, I felt really comfortable with the students. I feel like I finally know them pretty well and this made it easier to relate to them. When you relate and can act more calm around students this overall will help you teach the material better and I really learned this lesson this week! I feel guilty that it took me this long to be comfortable enough with them to be more personable and open but now that I am I have realized they have changed too. I feel like last week they started chatting with me more about everything and they felt better coming to talk to me about things such as grades and just asking general questions about assignments. Mrs. B and I had an opportunity to talk about this during my mid term review and I was so glad to hear her say she thought the atmosphere between students and I really opened up as well. In the beginning, I was pretty nervous to share anything personal and I believe it came off stand off ish. But now, I see students enjoy making connections and seeing that their teachers are not robots.

This week, I also had more of my classes working through projects instead of lectures and this was super fun as well. In my animal science class, we are on the topic of animal welfare vs. animal rights. This is my big class of 31 kids and they are SUPER chatty! Classroom management in this class is a pretty big struggle everyday. But, instead of notes, we approached this topic as more of a discussion and then project. We debated many animal issues and I was gladly surprised when they really got into the debates. After the debates, they were then assigned to pick an animal issue with their partner to create a post and see both sides of the argument. So far, they have actually worked very well and I am so excited to see how their posters and presentations turn out.

Overall this week was super beneficial from receiving feedback from my mid term and reviewing more things I can change and improve but also creating stronger connections with students that so far have resulted in better classroom learning as well!