Reminders for Lab C and Beyond!
- Please send your plan of attack to your TA's and me by Friday so that we know you have a plan and how is responsible for which parts of the Lab. You may help each other out but you must submit your own work for all parts of the resource packet, including block plan and scope and sequence. It also makes sense to just publish all of these as webpages on Google Docs and share it with your TA and me so that we can help in the editing and refining process.
- Each of you need to hand-in 20 different tasks on your progression sheets and a separate lesson plan on the day you teach.
- From that list of at least 20, choose 5 (place them on your lesson plan) that you think you might need in your lesson. You should base it partially off of what your partner is going to cover and then where you want to bring your students.
- Remember that you will only have 10 minutes to teach so plan on only getting through 2 or 3 for the entire class; however, you should also be showing how to use intratask variation for individuals and small groups.
- Also, I may ask you to teach from something else on your list of tasks, so you need to be familiar with all of the tasks and be able to teach them.
- On the assessment front, we are using a C9 form for each of you; however, the first partner will run an instant activity and the second partner will get the point for that. Likewise, the second partner will do the closure and the first partner will get the point. Although the C9 lists introduction as a requirement - we trust you would introduce yourself on the first day of school/lesson - and therefore you are not required to do so. If you feel you need to practice doing so, please feel free to.
As we discussed in class, the first half of the semester you've been given the tasks, cues, and challenges to teach as you worked on your emerging teaching skills. This second half of the semester you will be working to find the proper resources to guide your selections of tasks, cues and challenges. On top of finding developmentally appropriate tasks, cues and challenges for middle and high-schools, your teaching responsibilities will also increase to include unforeseen circumstances and behavior management scenarios. Be sure to read: Prevent Behaviour Problems cortland.ppt and Positive Learning Environment to understand our approach to providing a safe and positive learning environment.
As we've encouraged you all year, please get in contact with me and your TA to go over ideas and even just to talk shop about how you're feeling and adjusting to the increased work load. Believe you me, it gets harder and harder each semester.
We also encourage you to blog more often as it will make writing and organizing your blogs easier. A couple of you have been very consistent with your use of your blogs and I think your writing and reflection has helped your teaching. There have been numerous studies that show that by blogging, a student's writing can actually improve because you ofter end up re-reading parts of your own work and that inevitably you find grammatical errors, syntax, and sentence structure issues.
Feel free to try new gadgets and tools on our blogs so that others will enjoy your reading and summaries. Remember that you should be thinking about using blogs to keep your students, families, community members and social networks up to date on your awesome program. If you don't do it, no one else will. What are you waiting for? Dig in and enjoy.
