My Classes

My Classes

I taught 4 classes while at Shrewsbury High School. I taught two A-level Algebra Geometry Two classes (AG2), an Algebra Geometry One (AG1) class and an Honors Pre-calculus (HPC) class.

One of my AG2 classes had 20 students. There were a mix of sophomores and freshmen in the class. This class was the first class I took over and was the class I felt the most comfortable with throughout my year. In this class I had 5 students either on an IEP or a 504. Because of this I had to keep a closer eye on these students. The accommodations that came with these, ranged from bathroom breaks to extra time on tests to specific seating in the classroom. In this class, as well I had one FLEP (Former English Language Learner) that I had to cater toward. There was no real struggle for teaching this student I just had to make sure I read each set of directions out loud and I made sure I had everything written that I said in class so they could follow along.

I am a very animated teacher in the classroom. I jump around and make a fool of myself in order to get the kids attention and it helps them warm up to me as well as feel comfortable and its attention grabbing. Because I teach this way when the kids got rowdy all I would have to do is put on, what my colleagues call, “the teacher stare” and that would usually calm them down. This worked for me because I gained the students respect so early on by being very warm and truthful. As I taught class I would always admit when I made mistakes and the students liked that. I also asked them about their day and tried to learn facts about every one of my students' lives. So, when I gave the teacher stare they would get uncomfortable with the low level of energy coming from me and calm down. If that didn’t work I would count back from 5 and start saying “alright you hooligans let's reel it back in.''

In this class I had a lot of characters. The kids in this class were constantly entertaining. In this class, we had an air blower in the back of the room that would make hissing noises because it's starting to get old, so a few of the students who sat next to it, named it. They told me it was a rat snake that lived in the blower and drew a picture of what they thought it looked like. Whenever I asked for a number to use in an equation the students would always say 7 for some reason so it became an ongoing joke in the class to always say 7 for equations.

Of the formal feedback, I gained from this class, the places I struggled most were “In this class, students review each other's work and provide each other with helpful advice on how to improve”, “Students push each other to do better work in this class”, and “If I finish my work early in class, my teacher has me do more challenging work”. I would agree with all of these. During my class I had a few very high-level students that would finish their work early most days we had anything independent to do and I could have had more challenging work for them to do. When students are finished I would always tell them to work on ALEKS, which is an online tutoring program that all math students had to work on top of their math class. The other two go hand in hand with each other. In my classroom, we didn't do much of students checking each other's work. We did do group work and in that way students were helping each other and making connects. I also would encourage the groups to talk to each other before asking me a question and try to figure it out themselves but a lot of the time the students didn't want to do that when they weren't with people they were friends with outside of the classroom.

Besides the formal feedback, I got feedback daily from this class in how they responded to questions I asked and their facial features. For instance, when we did tool kit cards, I would continuously look at the students faces to see how they were absorbing the information. If there were confused faces I knew to break down that part of the card in a different way. Or, if I was going too fast I always had one students just look at me and make a “slow down” gesture and give me a face like they were a deer in headlights. I also got feedback about what information they understood and didn't understand when they broke up to do group work and started asking questions to each other. The questions and connections they make when I am not teaching at the front of the room is the best feedback there is.

I also taught another AG2 class that consisted of 23 students. Of the 23 students, there was a mix of mostly freshmen and sophomores. This was the second class I took over. In this class, I had 5 students on either an IEP or a 504 plan. These accommodations were the same in which I had to let the students have extra time on tests, some of them I had to let use a baby calculator, others had preferential seating and a few were allowed to use their tool kit cards on tests and quizzes. I had no ELL students in this class.

The class was the one I struggled with most with classroom management. The students in this class were extra rowdy and I will admit some days it was almost impossible to have them settle down. When I started this class I would try and get their attention by yelling but I realized fast this did not work. So, like the other class, I adopted the counting down from 5 and then the teacher stare in order to grab their attention. Also, every few weeks we would have to have a respectful conversation about how when they talk while I am talking it shows they do not respect me and how rude that is. They would also start to pack up early most days and to try and curb this, I would make an exit ticket. I also had a conversation about packing up early with them and made an analogy to taking a test. I would tell them “how would you like it if you were working on a test in my class, and you have 3 minutes left and I just decided to take the test away from you”. This helped with some of them and they understood why it was so rude.

The formal feedback I got from the class shows me in this period, I struggled most with “to help me understand, my teacher uses my interests to explain difficult ideas to me”, “if I finish my work early in class, my teacher has me do more challenging work”, “the level of my work in this class goes beyond what I thought I was able to do” and “when asked, I can explain what I am learning and why”. I was surprised that 48% of them said they disagreed that the level of work goes beyond what they thought they were able to do, because the quiz and test scores for this class were usually lower across the board. But again, I struggled to make more difficult work for AG2 when they were finished with their assignments in class. When I received the feedback that my teacher doesn't use my interests to explain difficult ideas to me the next day I integrated it into my lesson plan on the fly. We were reviewing function notation on how you can take f(x)=x+1 and then when given f(2)=?, you have to plug in 2 every time you see an x. My students were having a very hard time seeing this. On Instagram, it is popular now to solve problems like this.

So, when I connected the fact that this is similar to function notation it was like something clicked in the majority of their brains and they understood function notation after weeks of trying to find a good way to explain it to them. Lastly, the question that says I am able to explain what I am learning and why, I would agree I struggled with this in class. I believe my students would be able to explain what they are learning, but the why is a struggle. I struggled in connecting some of the topics to each other in this classroom because we had to spend so much more time trying to explain the content since a lot of the students were lower.

The assessment I had analyzed based off of expected performance from my mentor teacher was given to both of my AG2 classes. It was a test on function transformations. I have discussed a lot about this assessment in chapter 7 “Reflective Practice”.

My third class I took over was AG1. This class consisted of 11 students until the last week of my practicum. I got 1 new student and one transferred schools and another transferred to another class. So, when I left, it was 10 students. Of the 12 students, I had in and out, 9 of them were on either a 504 or an IEP. The accommodations I had to follow were the same as the other classes. I had students who got extra time on assessments, preferential seating, the use of toolkit cards on assessments, using a baby calculator on all assessments and a different room if they wanted to take assessments. I had no ELL students in this class. Classroom management in this class was the same for my AG2 classes.

The formal feedback I got from the class shows me in this period, I struggled most with “in this class, students work together to help each other learn difficult content”, “in this class, students are asked to teach (or model) to other classmates a part or whole lesson”, and “in this class, students review each other's work and provide each other with helpful advice on how to improve”. Because of the level of the students in my class and the personalities in this class it is difficult to have the students give feedback to each other. A Lot of the students in this class had strong personalities and if you asked them to explain to others what was going on they would talk down to the others in the class. Also, we had a lot of problems with students asking questions and some of the higher-level students making fun of them for being “dumb” even though I continuously talked about how all questions are valid.

The fourth class I took over, was HPC. this class consisted of 23 students. Only two of the students in this class were on an Ed. plan, with the accommodation of extra time on assessments. There were no ELL students in this class.

The formative feedback I received from this class that I needed to work on, was “I am able to connect what we learn in this class to what we learn in other subjects” and “to help me understand, my teacher uses my interests to explain difficult ideas to me”. For this class, it is difficult to connect pre-calculus to softer skilled classes however a lot of the students in the class are in psychics which uses a lot of calculus topics, so I could have integrated that into the class more. Also, when I received the feedback of “to help me understand, my teacher uses my interests to explain difficult ideas to me”, I started to integrate their interests into the classroom. My mentor teacher used a lot of problems that centered around food so I started to do the same.

Challenging Students

During my time at Shrewsbury High School I had many challenging students but two who suck out the most. The first student who challenged me would constantly tell me “Ms. Webster I just don't care I’m not doing it”. This particular student was actually one of my brightest students I had. However, they had a tough home life so it was hard to get them motivated at all. They would sit in the back of the classroom with their hood on and do nothing no matter how often I asked them to try. They would tell me “why would I do any work if I’m just going to stalk shelves my whole life or fix cars that makes no sense”. This particular student challenged not only me but my mentor teacher as well. In order to get some level of success with this student we had to put our heads together. They would participate if we did things in class that revolved around their interests. So, we would try and do interactive things in class more often, like kahoots or desmos activities, and those were the only things they would participate in. A breakthrough came in my last week at Shrewsbury High School. This student’s father came back into their life and started working with me and my mentor teacher in order to motivate this student and they started doing their work.

The second student who challenged me, challenged me in a different way. This student was very low with their math skills. They would not pick up on almost anything I did in class, and would never come and stay after. Motivation was never a problem with this student. They would always try, but I struggled to find a way to explain concepts that they would understand. I did not have the time to spend in class going over it with them either because of all of the other students I needed to cater toward as well in the class. This student was also very distracted so it was hard to get them to pay attention and then he would just give up when they got a little bit lost. The motivation was there until they got frustrated and would then just shut down. I ended up moving their seat so they were right in front of the room and I was able to get them to focus a little better when they were right in front of me. One of the tactics I had tried that seemed to work, was during ALEKS days (ALEKS is an online math tutoring site the students use. Every so often we would do an entire class period where they worked on ALEKS because they had to reach a certain topic goal completed. Some of them would not do it at home and the only way to get them to do their ALEKS was if I gave them class time), I took it upon myself to work with this student. I figured out it was easier for them to organize their work on a larger space too so I allowed them to work on the white board and I also would work with them to color code things to help visualize where the math was coming from in certain problems. They didn’t improve in a miraculous way, but I did see small steps every time I had worked with them. I had also worked hard to make sure if I saw students were lost, I was able to explain concepts in more ways than one in order to help them make connections.

Parent Interaction

One of the most influential parent interactions I had, was during an IEP meeting with one of my students. In this meeting, I learned a lot about why they were struggling and made a connection with the parents. I learned that this student has to pick up their sister from the bus every day because his parents cannot. I also learned that this student has always struggled in math, but they get help from their cousin at home. However, their cousin doesn't get home until late from work so they don't sleep much while they wait for their cousin to come home. From this meeting, I learned that their parents also want to be very involved in their school work and they wanted to start encouraging them more. After this meeting, this student has started to stay after school every Wednesday because of the encouragement of their parents. This showed me that parent involvement is crucial in a child's learning. If they didn't step up to encourage this student, they would not be improving right now.

Professional Development Day

One of the professional development (PD) days that I attended while at Shrewsbury High School was centered around advisory homeroom. We had a liaison from Character String come and visit us. He talked about the Character strong advisory curriculum that Shrewsbury plans to adopt. The whole PD day was centered around how we can connect better to our students and how we can help them connect to others around them at school. We did team building activities with people from other departments.