Long Practicum: Week 2

My second week of practicum is complete! I am a tad bit exhausted to say the least. It is a huge learning curve and so I feel like my brain is always thinking a million thoughts at any given time. It’s been a good learning experience though thus far.

This week I began my poetry unit. I had my students write their very own poems (a bio poem and an acrostic poem). These lessons took place over the course of a couple of days. Originally I thought it would be complete over one day however I now have more understanding of how long lessons like this take. There will always be early finishers however there will also be many students who are yet to complete the activity in the allotted time. As a teacher it’s about a balance of providing extra support for those who need it while also having extra activities that provide learning for those early finishers.

After looking at Blooms Taxonomy I have realized that the questions that I ask my students are based on students applying, understanding, and analyzing the given information. To start my poetry unit I asked my students to tell me everything they know about poetry. We created a chart together and I was genuinely surprised by everything they knew. This was a great tool to access student’s prior knowledge on the topic. As well with poetry, I often had read poems to the students and then asked them to think about anything they liked or noticed about the poem. Students would analyze the poems and pick out features of the poem that they were familiar with such as rhyming words. They had to question what the poem was saying, the poems theme and the imagery used and really differentiate the poem from other poems we had read previously. As I go through my poetry lessons I try to incorporate guided practice into the lesson. I introduce the poem they will be writing and together we create a poem together in order to solidify student understanding. I also demonstrate a sample poem for students to reference and then students interpret the poem. Once I have introduced this new concept I try to incorporate think-pair-share where students have to discover and discuss with another student rhyming words or examples that we can use. In this sense my questioning allows students to apply what they have just learned by having discussion. Finally I check for understanding by asking students to repeat what the task is and allowing for an open question/answer period where students can ask any questions they may have. I often ask students to repeat the task back to me so I know who was listening and who was not.

Overall I think it is very difficult to come up with good, quality questions to ask students. It’s easy just to ask anything but creating questions that actually increase student learning and dig deeper than the surface is a challenge. I hope to work on my questioning over the course of practicum. All in all second week of practicum was fun and rewarding. I learned a lot and it can be overwhelming at times but regardless I hope to grow as an educator and a person over the course of the next two months.