Student Learning

During my first semester of student teaching, I was enrolled in the course Teaching Mathematics K-8. One of the required assignments was to document a child’s mathematical learning. Here is my final documentation of Jasmine. ( pseudonym)

Final Documentation of Jasmine

It has been such a wonderful experience documenting Jasmine. I have learned a great deal about Jasmine and her love of math and IXL. Jasmine is a very smart young girl; she is kind and is always willing to help her fellow peers, when I began to document Jasmine, I could not believe how quick she was when it came to math bell work. Often I would ask her if she needed help. Jasmine would politely tell me “no Ms. Christine, I got it”, and there were times, where she would cry and tell me, “I just don’t get it”, and I would sit by her and we would, talk about what she was having trouble with, usually after we would talk, she would be fine and continue trying.

The one thing that I can say is that Jasmine is going to continue to grow academically. She is very determined and tries very hard in whatever she does. The one thing that concerns me about Jasmine is that she really gets down on herself when she does not grasp a concept on her first try. For example, on my documenting a Child’s Learning entry 2, I stated, “As I sat by Jasmine and another little girl, I noticed Jasmine was having a difficult time visually seeing how many rectangles where in a picture. Jasmine thought that there were four rectangles. However, my CT pointed out nine. This led to Jasmine crying and feeling frustrated. I asked her why she was crying and Jasmine said, “I don’t get it, I only see four”. This was concerning, so my CT told her “it was okay to make mistakes, that’s how we learn.” The authors of Intentional Talk Kazemi & Hintz (2014) shed some light on the importance of making mistakes. They state, “remember that it’s okay to make mistakes and revise our thinking, children must feel comfortable to take risks, to put out partial ideas or ideas that are still in development, and stumble when they are learning something new” (p.19).....

In my second semester of student teaching, I was enrolled in the course Reading & Diversity II. One of our ongoing assignments was to have weekly reading sessions with students who needed extra assistance in reading and comprehension. Below is an excerpt of one of my reading sessions, followed by my students work.

EDUC 331L

Reading Diversity 2

October 16, 2019

A DR-TA Strategy Lesson

This Week, I worked with all five students. MV, KA, MR, JG, DS. After looking through chapter nine of Thomas G. Gunning’s textbook, Creating Literacy Instruction for All Students. I decided that I would work on the strategy DR-TA (Directed Reading- Thinking Activity). As stated in the textbook, “Because DR-TA is an active process, all students are encouraged to make predictions or at least to indicate a preference for one of the predictions made by others.” (Gunning, 2019, p. 391). Since all of the students that I work with read below fifth grade, I decided to share the book Fall In Line Holden, written by the author Daniel W. Vandever. This book is a third to fifth grade level reading book, it does have words that the students were not familiar with such as , conformity, indigenous and mutton stew. Therefore, we did take time to talk about those words. I also made sure that the students knew what I meant by making predictions.

At the beginning of the lesson, I showed the students the cover of the book. I asked them to think about what they were going to learn about the story, instead of answering that question, the students made predictions. MV, wrote down that she thought the boy “was pushing the kids in line.” KA thought, “He is bossing them around.” JG said, “He is different” DS said, “He cut the line.” and MR said, “The boy is bossing.” I thought that these predictions that the students made were decent, all of their predictions were based on the cover of the book.

The worksheet that I used is pictured below. It is from the website Teaching Tolerance; it is based on the DR-TA strategy. I choose this worksheet, because it is age and grade level appropriate and the questions are pretty straight forward. The students were asked to think about “what they are going to learn from the text,” “what do they predict will happen,” “what do they know about the author and what do they know about the characters.” ....