Second Weekly Review

It was not a surprise to me that this week flew by quicker than last week.  I have been learning so much in the past two weeks and have been getting some wonderful classroom and guidance exposure.  I struggled a bit on Monday, when I had my first session alone in a classroom.  I learned how to turn this bad experience upside down and finished my week strong by teaching smaller groups and working individually with students.  When I first started working with the students, most of the kids would walk right past me and go to Mrs. Theroux with their problems, even if she was busy working with someone else.  Now the students can come to me.  I felt like I was great help for Mrs. Theroux with my organization, but not so much with taking over her overwhelming load of concerned children.  I mostly spent my first week watching how the school ran and how Mrs. Theroux worked with the different age groups.  This week I felt like I helped out much more.  I did not see Mrs. Theroux as much this week because I worked more independently with the students. I was teaching her small math discovery groups while she met with parents, helping with special education students while she was in teachers meetings, and observing how her children played during recess duty, when she handled major problems inside.  This week I was trusted to help the students with their class work and with their emotional situations.  My final goal is still to be able to teach my own class, and this week I worked towards it by gaining the trust and respect I need individually and within small groups.  Soon I will have worked with everyone in the bigger classrooms individually, so when I return to teach my own lesson plans, hopefully, the class will respect me, and I will be able to get my points across.   It was hard to begin this week on the wrong foot, but I am glad that it turned around quickly, and I am ready to go into my final week with my end goals in mind.

To further help me gain knowledge outside of the classroom, I took the time to read some handouts Jen Fletcher has given me, and I have begun to read some interesting chapters in Lost at School, by Ross W. Greene.  I read the first three chapters called, “School of Hard Knocks,” “Kids Do Well If They Can,” and “Lesson Plans.” From this reading, I learned where some bad behaviors originate, “…behind every challenging behavior is either an unsolved problem or a lagging skill” (Greene, 48).  Understanding children is the most important skill for teaching a class.  The problems presented could cause teachers to think that a kid is just looking for attention, he just wants his own way, he is trying to be manipulative, or he is just not motivated.  These are the wrong assumptions to make.  In reality a student’s behavior reflects a difficulty he is having.  For example, it is a challenge for him to make transitions between one mind-set or task to another.   He has difficulty seeing the “gray color” because he is such a black-and-white thinker, he has a poor sense of time, or he has anxiety which stops him from being able to problem-solve.  After being able to understand what a child’s learning type is, it can be predictable what his or her bad behavior might be during a specific class.  When I think back to Monday and how some kids were behaving, I realize that now the same kids that were acting out have some of these difficulties I just listed.  For example, in my Monday afternoon class there was a young boy who hid under his desk, pouted, and would not do the cat activity no matter how kindly I asked him.  I have seen him four times this week in the guidance office and now realize he has some high anxiety issues.  I watched Mrs. Theroux handle some problems he was having with the other students during our lunch group sessions, and now I know how to handle him and understand him in the classroom. Another example was when I had someone come up to me and tell me that another girl in the group was doing the cat activity wrong. He told me he was not going to participate anymore and stormed out of the room.  I was not sure what to do then, but now have learned that he is a black-and-white thinker, like me.   His partner was thinking out of the box in the “gray” areas, and he did not understand her thought process.  If I were to handle this situation today, I would take him to his partner, have her explain her thought process, and then have her give the list and pencil to the boy, so he could write his ideas and share his thought process.

Looking back on that Monday class I am a bit ashamed.  After working with the kids for another week and understanding their learning styles, Monday’s class seems obvious how to handle.   I think everything happened so fast and all at once. The students presented their challenging behavior to me all at the same time, and before I really had had the chance to get to know them.  Instead of addressing the students individually and getting everyone on track to prove to them that they could all participate and present their smart ideas, I tried to address the class as a whole.  I assumed that the problem was that I was a substitute teacher who was being tested by her students.  Now I know what to look for in their challenging behavior and, most importantly, how to stop it.  Lost at School, by Ross W. Greene, contains many great ideas on how to work with children and understand them and their behavior.  I will continue to read this book and work with the children individually until the day I present my own lesson.