I may just copyright this phrase it is just that true.
However, before I start this blog- Last week I was asked to show an example of one of my student's weebly sites (we have begun to refer to them as Digital Portfolios). Below I have listed a couple of links to two of them. Please feel free to look through their sites noting the use of subpages (under humanities- poetry section, etc.) blogs/personal reflections, pictures, attached file work, and the like). They are all very proud and still excited about these sites.
http://brendamcla.weebly.com
http://davidmcla.weebly.com/index.html
BLOG-
Last week I had a lesson that just completely hit a brick wall. I put something together that I thought would be useful and engaging for the students but it was almost 100% not so. It was intended to be a brief way, using a graphic organizer, to summarize what the students had learned on this unit thus far. It ended up taking the whole class and most of it was only passingly understood and completed by the students. Looking back I see that I made a couple of big missteps in what I was trying to do. A lot things went wrong but just a few were that I failed to realize that with so much going on in the graphic organizer I needed to give and example and model. I also needed to structure the expectations, and especially the ways of getting those expectations done, more thoroughly putting it visually somewhere so it was each of these would be clear. I had intended to use it for a ten minute aside to recall all of the main things we had done and didn't do enough leg work to get it there and this cost me a lesson.
While I hate to loose an entire class lesson time this one may have been worth it in that it highlighted some very important things that I need to take into consideration when doing ANYTHING in a lesson.
In all long running endeavors we attempt I believe there are always to main benchmarks that situate your best attempt and worst attempts at something. These constantly shift (hopefully upwards) but the two points are great tools for learning and basing progress and decline. They aren't just average every day occurrences, and instead are memorable enough in their ya! and Bummer! effect so as to graspingly stick to memory. This last lesson was my worst attempt at creating and teaching a lesson so far and I couldn't be happier to have fallen on my face. Glad it happened early on.
“What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise”
― Oscar Wilde
This last week, weekend and this week I have been working very hard at working on the challenges that came up from last weeks lesson. Because of that I had my BEST example happen after teaching a class this week. I poured all of my effort into, not only improving my attention to these details, but to trying to get a 100% increase and the lesson and class were just great. On top of getting my current BEST, it was actually a formally documented midterm observation for my student teaching. It wasn't perfect, I doubt it ever will be, and I got a some really great constructive observations of how to improve, but it set the bar higher, something to continue to strive for, for all of my future classes.
Been a challenging but good week. Thanks for reading.
However, before I start this blog- Last week I was asked to show an example of one of my student's weebly sites (we have begun to refer to them as Digital Portfolios). Below I have listed a couple of links to two of them. Please feel free to look through their sites noting the use of subpages (under humanities- poetry section, etc.) blogs/personal reflections, pictures, attached file work, and the like). They are all very proud and still excited about these sites.
http://brendamcla.weebly.com
http://davidmcla.weebly.com/index.html
BLOG-
Last week I had a lesson that just completely hit a brick wall. I put something together that I thought would be useful and engaging for the students but it was almost 100% not so. It was intended to be a brief way, using a graphic organizer, to summarize what the students had learned on this unit thus far. It ended up taking the whole class and most of it was only passingly understood and completed by the students. Looking back I see that I made a couple of big missteps in what I was trying to do. A lot things went wrong but just a few were that I failed to realize that with so much going on in the graphic organizer I needed to give and example and model. I also needed to structure the expectations, and especially the ways of getting those expectations done, more thoroughly putting it visually somewhere so it was each of these would be clear. I had intended to use it for a ten minute aside to recall all of the main things we had done and didn't do enough leg work to get it there and this cost me a lesson.
While I hate to loose an entire class lesson time this one may have been worth it in that it highlighted some very important things that I need to take into consideration when doing ANYTHING in a lesson.
In all long running endeavors we attempt I believe there are always to main benchmarks that situate your best attempt and worst attempts at something. These constantly shift (hopefully upwards) but the two points are great tools for learning and basing progress and decline. They aren't just average every day occurrences, and instead are memorable enough in their ya! and Bummer! effect so as to graspingly stick to memory. This last lesson was my worst attempt at creating and teaching a lesson so far and I couldn't be happier to have fallen on my face. Glad it happened early on.
“What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise”
― Oscar Wilde
This last week, weekend and this week I have been working very hard at working on the challenges that came up from last weeks lesson. Because of that I had my BEST example happen after teaching a class this week. I poured all of my effort into, not only improving my attention to these details, but to trying to get a 100% increase and the lesson and class were just great. On top of getting my current BEST, it was actually a formally documented midterm observation for my student teaching. It wasn't perfect, I doubt it ever will be, and I got a some really great constructive observations of how to improve, but it set the bar higher, something to continue to strive for, for all of my future classes.
Been a challenging but good week. Thanks for reading.