Digging Into Lab C (255)

Reminders for Lab C and Beyond!
- Please send your plan of attack to your TA's and me by Friday March 11th ,so that we know you have a plan. Remember if you fail to submit your lesson plan, you will not teach and receive a zero for lab C. You must submit your own work for all parts of the resource packet, (LAB C Packets DUE March 25th) 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 us, so we can help in the editing and refining process.

- BE SURE TO CHECK THE SYLLABUS FOR ALL LAB C Details. 


-Each of you need to submit (E-mail) 40 tasks, cues, and challenges on your progression sheets and a separate lesson plan by March 11th then a printed one on the day you teach.

- From that list of at least 40, choose 5 (place them on your lesson plan) that you think you might need in your lesson.

- Remember that you will only have 15 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. 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.