C3. The teacher uses data from his/her own classroom teaching to evaluate his/her own strengths and areas for improvement.
After each class session, my mentor teacher would meet with me and my fellow mentee. Sometimes the meetings would be all together, but other times, I would meet individually with my mentor teacher for up to an hour at a time during our planning periods. Below are notes I made during these short conferences in order to improve upon my presentations, oral skills, lesson plans, and everything in between:
In the “Reflection” sections of my lesson plans, I would jot down ideas for the next class, along with what I can improve on in order to better help the students understand the context at hand. In the picture above, I reminded myself to connect future lessons to current events since I would like students to understand why we still talk about Greek Mythology in today’s day and age. I also jotted down some other myths we could talk about in future classes such as the story of King Midas or the myth of Hermes. I ended up deciding to do a lesson on constellations and Zodiac signs, therefore my notes on that section begin with “Using astrology to think about different horoscopes in connection to the gods and goddesses” and end with “Asynchronous AND synchronous”. A few technological resources I could use to portray this information were finally listed last in the above screenshot.
In this screenshot above, my rough layout for the week’s classes were jotted down. For the last week of pre-service teaching, I decided to take on teaching Monday’s two English classes and one Mythology class, along with Wednesday’s one Mythology class (when I usually only taught two Mythology classes a week). At the top of this picture were some reminders I wrote down to myself for the upcoming week, and then my plans for the next four classes followed.
With the help of my mentor teacher and fellow mentee, I worked on these improvements both inside and outside of the classroom. I was never judged nor bashed for the mistakes I made, but instead I used the mistakes as ways to grow upon and improve the practices I have been learning in my college classes in order to better apply them into the classrooms I was teaching.