Future Student Teachers

Dear Incoming Core ¾ Students:

            You will make it.  When I was in Core 2 looking at Core 3 and 4, I didn’t believe for one minute that I’d make it through the year and the KPTP and the licensure tests and the student teaching and there was definitely no way that I was going to be ready for my own classroom. When I asked current Core ¾ students how they felt they all said the same thing, “By the time you get to this point, you will be so ready for your own classroom,” and they didn’t lie. Right now, I am so excited to be teaching next year that I’d almost like to fast-forward to August. I am a completely different person and teacher than I was when I walked into Core 3 and you will be too.

            A couple of things to keep in mind as you move forward:

-        Be as organized as possible. Especially in Core 3 and in your student teaching. If you’re not organized, spend all summer getting there because a lot of my struggles came from the fact that in Core 3 I couldn’t keep assignments straight and, in my student teaching, I was very last minute in everything.

-        The odds of you having the same teaching/classroom management style as your Mentor Teacher is slim to none. And yes, you will have a teaching/classroom management style even if you don’t believe it now. Try and find the balance between your teaching style and hers/his; it’ll make you a better teacher in the long run.

-        Walk into the classroom on the very 1^st day as the adult in the room. Fake it til’ you make it essentially. Confidence in your teaching is hard to come by naturally and it just takes you mentally telling yourself ‘I’m in charge’ 17 times an hour.

-        IT IS OK IF YOU HATE YOUR STUDENT TEACHING EXPERIENCE. Or strongly dislike it. Or consider dropping out. Don’t drop out though. I’ve had a serious love/hate relationship with my student teaching experience and I can tell you that there is light at the end of the tunnel. You’ll fall in love with the kids and the days when they’re totally digging what you’re teaching them and that’ll keep you coming back.

-        Ask for help. Subpar teaching is not o.k. at any level. If you’re struggling with your own course load, email professors. I’ve had all of them and they incredibly understanding and willing to help. Utilize that to your full advantage.

-        ‘They’ (the man) will tell you that the KPTP is not a weekend project. They are mostly correct in that the KPTP is a buttload of work, but it can be accomplished in a weekend if that’s what it comes down too. It took me a week to get my completed and I stayed up until midnight every night getting through it. Keep that it mind. 

         You will use your textbooks more than you think when you start planning full time; mark them up and read them carefully, it will make the planning go so much smoother. When you walk into your placement, ask your MT what the big ‘movements’ are in education and then read up on it. Become very knowledgeable in the areas that are a topic of conversation between teachers at your school because the odds are that you will be asked about those topics at a job interview. My MT was very invested in trauma-based learning and I learned so much listening to her talk about; my first job interview I ever went on, I was asked about trauma-based learning and I was more prepared for the answer than the interviewers were expecting. 

        And most importantly, don’t take on more than you can handle. Say ‘no’ if you need to, take a sick day if you need to, don’t feel guilty for taking care of yourself through this process. 

            You are so close to being done and this will be the fastest and the longest year of your life. You’re almost a teacher and when you are finished with the program, you will be more than prepared to run your own classroom.

Best of Luck,

Bailey Yaussi

It’s OK

 It’s OK if you’ve hated your student teaching experience – it doesn’t mean you hate teaching.

 It’s OK if there are 33 teaching days left for you and you still don’t have a job nor know where you’re going.

 It’s OK if the first time you try an activity, it wasn’t as smooth sailing as you’d have liked.

 It’s OK if every lesson plan you have, you look back and see glaring flaws that only popped up when presented to students.

 It’s OK if you put off your KPTP until the last minute.

 It’s OK if you want to take a break for a year and pursue a different dream.

 It’s OK if you look around your MT’s room and it doesn’t look anything like the great classroom you’ve designed in your    head.

It’s OK if you struggle, if you cry, if you wonder if teaching is for you.

It’s OK if you put down all the stuff you’re doing and just sit down and eat your lunch.

 It’s OK, OK, OK

 It’s OK because the kids who hang out after the bell rings to show you their treasures and to tell you their stories.

 It’s OK because of the kids who hug you in the hall.

 It’s OK because of the kids who read a book all the way through for the first time in your class.

 It’s OK because of the lesson plan that went exactly like you imagined it.

 It’s OK because of the kids who make you laugh until you’ve got to sit down.

 It’s OK because of the positive feedback from a university supervisor that gives you hope.  

 It’s OK because of everything that makes every teacher stay…

 Kids are the best.

ELL Strategies

Arguments that can be made that academia is on its own a second language. Think about it: in every class, teachers build up vocabulary and ‘lingo’ for the subject matter and work every day on making their students fluent in every aspect of the curriculum. Science, for example, is very vocabulary dependent and without the common basis of understanding between students and the teacher and the material then no work can get accomplished. Lab work alone can could be considered its own language – from this non-science person’s point of view. Math could also fall under this category. Students spend all day long learning a new language so to speak.

As I was reading the article, “Language Acquisition: An Overview”, written by Kristina Robertson and Karen Ford, I realized that there were similarities between second language instruction and the basic instruction that goes on every day as the teacher scaffolds between the standards and the struggling students. In the article, readers are lead through the six steps of language acquisition and the teaching strategies that coincide and reading through those led me to some unique insights between ELL students and my experiences in my student intern placement. These insights arose from what is probably a unique situation- I get a rotation of 6^th grade, 7^th grade, and 8^th grade students daily. The specific scaffolding and chunking of every single step and the progression of instruction for ELL students is strikingly similar to the scaffolding and direct instruction and how it moves from 6^th grade all the way up to 8^th grade.

Having studied best teaching practices in college and steadily working on implementing them on my own in the classroom, I recognize many of the strategies for each stage of the language acquisition and I can process why they work so well for students learning a new language. However, when I looked at the strategies and considered the growing number of struggling students in classrooms (and the push from every side for better test results and more ‘effective’ teachers) I couldn’t help but wonder if the specific scaffolding for ELL couldn’t be adapted to provide language acquisition skills to every student learning the academia language.

In a recent in-service – my first as an almost teacher – an outside specialist was brought in for the afternoon session and considerable time was spent on scaffolding. Scaffolding is a basic household names to most teachers and is probably being used in most classrooms (because no one gets their dream students that read perfectly at grade level, however, I thought that the session was missing a certain real-world application when thinking of the general classroom. I really enjoyed the article because for each stage of learning acquisition there were direct steps and techniques to not only help the student survive in the classroom but climb in skills. When I implement scaffolding skills into my own teaching and lesson plans, I often get the feeling that I am helping the students survive but I’m not helping them climb in their skills. I keep specific students afloat in the class and caught up but do their reading skills ever increase?

As I read through the specific learning stages and the coinciding strategies I got the direct sense that these strategies weren’t just to fill out an IEP but to move a student up- there was a distinct expectation of learning and progress. Often, I feel that I am assisting learned helplessness in struggling students through my scaffolding – my techniques have no expectation of increased progress and the eventual stop of scaffolding but instead hold my desires that no student get left behind.

My point in whole is that ELL strategies are designed to move students quickly and effectively through the new language with a clear end-goal in mind. Complete control and handle on the language in both school and social circles. Scaffolding in the classroom does not often have that clear-end goal in mind. As I studied the techniques for each learning stage and took notes to implement in my own lesson plans I determined that in CORE 4, with specific students in mind, I would make it my goal to use scaffolding so effectively that students would end the school year needing significantly less scaffolding. Their skills would increase not plateau because of the level of assistance they were receiving.

Robertson, K., Ford, K. “Language Acquisition: An Overview.” Web. http://www.colorincolorado.org/article/language-acquisition-overview#h-stages-of-language-acquisition

Heartbreak

Heartbreak

The heartbreak is palpable. In the defiance, in the disrespect, in the disruptions, in the confessions they let leak in the class.

The heartbreak is clear. In every failing grade, in every unreturned phone call home, in every outburst, in every tear-jerking revelation that comes to light.

The heartbreak is fresh. In every handwritten letter to a teacher to talk about past traumas, in every fight in the hall, in every shouting match with a teacher, in every detention, in every out-of-school suspension.

The heartbreak is real. In every gang starting in the bathrooms, in every cigarette confiscated, in every curse word yelled, in every new black eye, in every absence.

The heartbreak is breathtaking. In every report, in every email, in every kid sent to the office, in every failed lesson.

The heartbreak is striking. In every 12-hour day, in every nasty parent, in every meeting where you’re inadequate, in every statistic that says you’re failing, in every kid that you can’t teach around.

The heartbreak is rampant. In every time you think of quitting, in every time you lose your cool, in every time you have buddy room passes written before the class starts, in every time you realize your 60 credit hours of English classes won’t tell you what to say, in every time you must google how to pronounce a student’s name, in every time you say that someone should have told you.

The heartbreak is all of this.

Please Stop Disrupting My Class and Read.....Please!

Core 3 has been one of the hardest semesters of my life; walking into the middle school in August, I had high hopes and expectations for myself. I would be the best student teacher ever, I would immediately have great classroom control and management, my planning would be spot-on and students would engage deeply with the books that I found riveting. *Hear my sarcasm and tears* My Core 3 goals took a hard hit. One of my pet ideas starting out as an inexperienced student teacher was that students who were ‘bad’ in the classroom where actually the students that couldn’t read (or struggled to read at least). However, like most underdeveloped ideas, I was bound to hit some road bumps. In my middle school classroom, I found that all my students could read and read well. They could comprehend at grade level – and above- with very little scaffolding, they had good fluency and word recognition rates, and very few learning disabilities. Yet, most them exhibited some very zoo-like behaviors. A solid amount of the zoo-like behaviors could be contributed to my shaky lesson planning and my lack of confidence in classroom management- but not all of them. The class did quite a bit to avoid the process of reading. As I reviewed my original research questions for the semester: What if all behavioral issues in the classroom can be solved by establishing better reading skills in the students that are exhibiting the issues? If good reading skills are established like classroom protocol is established every year and teachers make helping students find a favorite author or genre of books apart of their curriculum, will the students who quip ‘reading is stupid’ decrease through the year? What if not reading for enjoyment or reading and being miserable isn’t a personal trait that differs between individuals but is a lack sufficient skills and knowledge to become an independent reader? I found that I had discovered the very basic outline of my answer (these are questions that I could develop for years and never completely exhaust them) and that I had overlooked a very important student that would walk through the classroom: alliterate students. In Kylene Beers text, When Kids Can’t Read, she defines alliterate students as dormant readers, uncommitted readers, unmotivated readers, and unskilled readers (279). As I looked over the classroom that I call my own (even though its temporary) I decided to determine if my students were struggling with reading disabilities- in its many forms- or if they were just unmotivated, unskilled, or uncommitted readers. I took out any misbehavior that I contributed to my own developing classroom management and planning skills, other classroom factors such as time of day or school issues, and really looked at my students. I found that about half of them fell in the ‘love to read, carry a book around’ pool and the other half predominately fell into the ‘unmotivated and maybe unskilled’ pool. Unmotivated readers have a negative connotation towards reading and those who read; as Beers states, “They are our most difficult to reconnect reading because they don’t value the act or the people who enjoy reading” (279). I have found this to be extremely true- reading is an act with a negative value to them and even if they enjoy the story as it is read to them- these students DO NOT want to read on their own. In fact, I had a particular kid fall out of his chair and pretend to stab himself with his pencil to get out of individual reading. Is it bad that I had to struggle not to laugh at his dramatics? So, to compensate for these readers who avoid reading (I don’t think they’d read a stop sign if it wasn’t painted red) I have started reading the short stories we study in class out loud. Usually I had copies for the students to follow along with but enforcing that they were co-reading with me was hard. I’d stop at various points for discussion and scaffolding notes on graphic organizers so that students could engage with the text (discussion) and keep track of characters and events; however, I felt the frustration of the students who read well and loved to read- they were being held back. In my unit that will take place after Thanksgiving until Christmas break, I’ve tried to bridge the gap between whole-class reading and individual reading. In both cases engagement and accountability is a main concern for me, which I’m going to try guaranteeing through a timeline project on the individual reading and notes on the whole-class reading. My plans are still developing; however, I’m working in different literacy strategies that were introduced in the text 50 Instructional Routines to Develop Content Literacy by Douglas Fisher, William Brozo, Nancy Frey, and Gay Ivey. One of Beers main points about unmotivated readers was that they had to be drawn into the text and the book absolutely had to hold their interest. So, my attempts to create interest and then hold interest include using strategies like anticipation guides, graphic organizers to take notes so that content is displayed visually instead of in a linear fashion, reading responses that promote individual opinions, essential questions that are very controversial (for 7th graders), and most importantly, a creative writing assignment that makes them apart of the story. I’m building literacy strategies deep into the everyday classroom work- to scaffold for struggling readers and hold the students accountable for their reading- and to help with my classroom management (Research question 1&2). I am hoping that my improved classroom management, the various literacy strategies, and individualized nature of the assignments I’m building will reach out to unmotivated readers and pull them in. This extended research on my own planning and execution will *hopefully* make for a much smoother Core 4 in both planning and classroom management. Since I do have more freedom with the books I can chose, I am going to use more YAL instead of short stories to strive for 100% engagement from all students. And I’m going to continue to develop my answers to my research questions, this time with more information to work with. Literacy strategies, no matter how small, hold a dual purpose of accountability and building independent reading skills; this is very important to building classroom protocol towards reading and general behavior. As I dive into Core 4, I’ll have more opportunities to connect with students individually and put books in their hands until we find one that they can’t stop reading. Until next time- The overly optimistic and quite unrealistic student teacher. Sources: Beers, Kylene. When Kids Can’t Read: What Teachers Can Do. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2003. Fisher, D., Brozo, W., Frey, N., Ivey, G., 50 Instructional Routines to Develop Content Literacy. Boston: Pearson, 2015.

Kate Conference

Kansas Association of Teachers of English 2017

This was my first time attending KATE or even any kind of professional conference so I walked into the weekend not knowing what to expect. As I review my notes over the weekend, I think what sticks out the most to me is the love for literature that those teachers had. Don’t get me wrong, I love to read and I have my favorite authors, however, when I won a book by Agathe Christie as a door prize and I didn’t know who she was- my fellow Core 3 classmates were shocked. Apparently, I have some reading to catch up on!

On Friday, I was not able to attend very many of the Breakout Sessions due to outside schedules; on Saturday, though, I heard a Breakout Session that really spoke to me. First, a few facts about me: I am a perfectionist, I beat myself up (mentally) when I can’t achieve perfection, especially in my schooling, and I struggle to not put myself in a pre-designed box and then beat myself up when I don’t fit. It’s all very unhealthy in an attempt to look perfect. I get that from my mother so let’s collectively blame her. So, on Saturday, after a small meltdown before 8 am, I decided to go to the Breakout Session by Brooke Johnson called Finding Balance by Letting Go.

In an hour-long session, most of which was spent laughing, Brooke Johnson talked about her meltdown in the classroom, being diagnosed with anxiety and depression, and eventually finding a way to make teaching manageable through slash identities and permission slips. Johnson got these foundations from the author Brene Brown. A slash identity is basically writing down everything that you do to fill time in your life and everything that you want to do (ex. Teacher/student/runner) so that if one area of your life starts to fade, your whole identity doesn’t fade with it. I found this especially important as I look out on my first year of teaching- it seems so easy to give my life away to everything that goes into teaching and very quickly end up burned out and having a meltdown during 7^th hour. Having different parts of your life that you dedicate time to and that fulfill your soul makes balance in your life so much easier- getting up from the desk and leaving the school at a reasonable hour is easier when you have a life outside of the double doors. For the past two days I’ve started writing down everything in my life that I consider a part of my identity as well as other areas I’d like to explore so that I can find ways to fulfill my life outside of teaching; I want teaching to be the icing on the cake of life.

Permission slips, the second part of this session, are going to be a life saver- I can already tell. Basically, you write a permission slip for yourself regarding anything in life: permission to leave the school early, permission to close your classroom door during lunch, permission to decline the invitation to that shower, permission to let yourself off the hook for turning that assignment in late, etc.… As I wrote out a few permission slips for myself, I realized that it rubbed my perfectionist self raw but that was exactly what I need: permission to not be perfect.

I walked out of that Breakout Session feeling motivated to develop healthier mental habits in my life, especially my teaching life. I have had numerous veteran teachers tell me that the turnover rate for new teachers rises every year because of all that is expected of a teacher: the teaching and the paperwork and the planning and the support and anything else that gets added before I graduate. I would like very much to not be included in the turnover rate and I have a great Mentor Teacher who is using this last year of my college to slowly introduce me to all aspects of teaching and letting me try my hand at small chunks of planning/grading/parent meetings/etc. so that when I walk into my own classroom, I am more prepared. However, I want to be prepared to take care of myself mentally and physically as well, so that as each new school year rolls around I am there in my classroom greeting students.

There were so many other great things about the KATE conference and each Breakout Session offered something to feed the mind- I wrote on the Breakout Session affected me most immediately; I felt that I needed to hear that Session on that day and before I melt under the stress of Core 3- I give myself permission to take a break and take a walk.  

Creative Writing and 7th Graders

It’s now October and I’ve had the opportunity to assist and watch my MT teach her first unit of the year: a novel study. As the students are wrapping up this novel study, the final assignment is a writing assignment- each student is to write an epilogue for the novel in which they include themselves in the story line as a character. While the students balked at the idea of reading an entire book (the horror!), they have mostly jumped right into the idea of this writing assignment- probably because they can use the chrome books but whatever works!  While assisting the MT and conferencing with students in the last three class periods as they have been writing this epilogue I have noticed some interesting things about the writing: 

• Some of the students beautifully summarized the novel itself but added nothing to story nor made themselves apart of the story. The distinction between summarizing the novel and creatively adding to the novel had to be made several times using an example of my MT's own epilogue before some students quit trying to write a book report. Imaginative writing of this nature was very laborious for some of the students. Though they quickly breezed through a summary of the book, adding to the book with creativity thought up by themselves stumped quite a few of them.
  


• The way the students spoke and the way they talked were almost completely parallel. There was almost no formal English in the writing- distinct speech patterns became distinct writing patterns and I think that if names were removed from the individual epilogues, I could still make a pretty good guess on whose was whose.
  
  
• Myself being a very strong reader and a strong writer, I was amazed at the difference that the students went about creating an epilogue out of their imagination and the way I did. I very quickly wrote myself into the story by creating a new role and new interactions between the main characters and myself that tied back to the story line. It took a matter of minutes and I didn’t pull from any direct source around me to come up with my modified storyline. However, a large portion of the students pulled directly from other sources of literacy in their lives and I could read it in their stories. One student basically rewrote a story that had been on the news but instead made herself and the characters the focus of the story; another kid took the theme and details of a popular video game and put himself and the characters into the game. I also noticed that some of the students wrote the epilogue around the drama of going on in their lives: boyfriends breaking up with them or 'cheating' on them, friendships broke up, and other issues along that thread.

 

When reading the epilogues of various students during class time and conferences I tried very hard not to get caught up in surface editing. Instead of spending time correcting punctuation and sentence structure, I tried to instead complement each student on their storyline and suggest ways to make it stronger or suggest a different turn the story could take. Of course, I did remind them to include punctuation at the end of a sentence, capitalize the first letter of the sentence, and capitalize names and other minor details such as that I tried to not to overly focus on grammar. I think that if I had made a big deal of the grammar aspect of the writing process a lot of the kids would have shut down and accomplished nothing on the assignment.

As I begin planning my unit to teach in the classroom, and the one I will turn in for a grade, I have made creative writing a large part of them both. I think the thing most students struggled with the most was putting their own opinion onto paper- even though I told all of them numerous times that they had great and interesting things to say, a lot of students struggled to convince themselves that their stories were 'good enough'. They were engaged and they were struggling. As I have been making the plans for my unit, I have weaved creative writing into every single day; when the class gets to the last project (writing of course) I want them to be much more comfortable with the idea of using their own ideas to create an essay.


Overall, I am really enjoying getting to know my students writing styles and I can't wait to see if my unit works well with them! I love all the students in that class and I was amazed that I was thinking of all of them while I was planning.

Dear Students

Dear Students

• Dear Alex: please sit down; forget distracting the class, you’re distracting me!
• Dear Leo: I’m so sorry you got kicked in the stomach on the bus to school. It’s 7^th hour so the pain has faded but now you are distracted thinking about your bus ride home.
• Dear Grady: the sub was wrong when she said you were a terrible person- you are bright and funny and I love having you in my class.
• Dear Lucy: nobody ever returns phone calls or emails, is anyone home taking care of you?
• Dear Carson: I see you trying so hard even with your broken glasses; I wish I could take you to the eye doctor.
• Dear Kale: thank you for the three-minute basketball lessons during passing period; I’m so glad you have something you love.
• Dear Alexis: you are SO SMART! You don’t need me to hold your hand during the entire assignment, trust me.
• Dear Randi: no matter how many times I talk to you- you still have outbursts in class. What am I missing?
• Dear Darby: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD QUIT BRINGING SLIME TO SCHOOL. THANK YOU.
• Dear Emily: I take it personally when you sing and dance while I am talking; if you are going to ignore me, please do it discreetly.
• Dear Isaiah: thank you for telling me that I was the best teacher’s assistant you’ve ever had. Even if I’m really the teacher.
• Dear Danny: the first time I lead class alone your behavior was so bad that I cried in the shower that night. 
• Dear Lilly: every time marriage comes up in a class discussion you warn everyone that when you get married then your husband might start beating you. You're only thirteen- I guess fairy tales died young for you. 
• Dear Eli: you have so much energy! Seriously, I want to make you go run laps before you come into class. At least you are smiling while you’re bouncing off the walls.
• Dear Students: I’m trying so hard- thank you for coming to school today.

-Teacher

-All names are pseudonyms that represent real students walking into the classroom every day.

We Have To Read In The Classroom Before We Read Outside Of It

“There are no BAD children- there are simply children PROBLEM-SOLVING to the best of their abilities”.

This is the first thing that my MT told me when I walked into her classroom and I have found it to be solid advice that challenges me to change my perspective on students that fall under the broad umbrella of ‘disrupting class’. Instead of looking at the student that is bent around in his chair doodling on the paper of the student behind him or the group of girls who can’t seem to stop giggling in the corner as an annoying tick, I have instead tried to look at them as students who were trying to draw attention away from a bigger problem. They are problem-solving.

So in the past 2 weeks, my MT has started pulling students that are disrupting class into the hall and asking them how we can help them stay on task better. (As a note- in the middle school, when students need a cool-down period from their disruptions, they go stand in the hall so this time is being capitalized on, not pulling students out of class for the exact purpose of having a talk with them.) There have been a few good answers: one student said he couldn’t see the board and so he was moved forward, one student didn’t want to sit next to the person that they were currently, a third was hungry. However, most often when a student is asked why they are struggling in the class and how they can be helped, the generic answer is “I don’t like to read”. Follow up questions regarding what books might entice them to read more, what they struggle with while reading, if they have time to read independently at home, or if they understand a story better when they listen to it usually results in answers like ,”I don’t know”, or “reading is stupid- this class is stupid”. There is a definite diversion to reading. 

In an adjoining Teaching Core Class, we (the student teachers) are reading a text by Kylene Beers, “When Kids Can’t Read”, and I can’t seem to put it down. In the first three chapters, I felt that this author really understands what I was only starting to see in the classroom, “These kids can’t read” (Beers 4).  I don’t mean that all the students are illiterate- I mean that these kids lack the skills to be independent readers. Reading is a skill to be enhanced over time but most of these students view it an inherent trait and not liking to read is as much apart of them as their name. This is not good news for a future English teacher and makes planning future lesson plans around books seem a little impossible. However, according to Beers, “...moving beyond ‘These kids can’t read’ to defining what they could and couldn’t do helped focus instruction” (34). I read the list that Beers established as characteristics of dependent readers over and over, with each bullet point a face or a name coming to mind. In the coming weeks, I am going to take my list of students and establish with my MT what I think makes them dependent readers and how would be the best way to reach them where they are and build up from that.

As I’ve looked over the classes that I get to observe and teach under the tutelage of the MT- I have developed two professional research questions that I plan on pursuing through the course work of the teaching program and the lessons I get to design and teach. The first research question I plan to pursue is this: What if all behavioral issues in the classroom can be solved by establishing better reading skills in the students that are exhibiting the issues? This is not an unique question or one that I feel I can adequately answer in just one short school year of student teaching; however, I hope to establish a foundation of thought that I can carry into my first years of teaching as I continue to test my theories in the classroom.

My second research question is this: If good reading skills are established like classroom protocol is established every year and teachers make helping students find a favorite author or genre of books apart of their curriculum, will the students who quip ‘reading is stupid’ decrease through the year? What if not reading for enjoyment or reading and being miserable isn’t a personal trait that differs between individuals but is a lack sufficient skills and knowledge to become an independent reader? This is such a broad question and it piggy-backs off ideas brought forth in Beers text, but as I start to design lengthier plans and units for my class, I am going to keep this question as the foundation of my teaching strategy.

Because for everything- there has to be a starting point.

Sources:

Beers, Kylene. When Kids Can’t Read: What Teachers Can Do. Heinemann, 2003.

In the first week of my last year of college, I have been asked more about my goals than at any other point in my life. When the 'real world' is looming and you are about to step into the career of your choice, having a pre-established plan of attack and goals to back it up seems to be the keys to success. I am a great creator of lists that never get finished and post-it note instructions and tips for life that get left in random spots; journaling out my goals has never been something that I did with any success. If I did sit down and right out my goals, I found I always missed the important one. I would focus on the overall picture instead of the stepping stones. 

The overall picture of the next nine months of my life can be summed up into three points:  

1. 1. Graduate in May as a licensed teacher. 

2. 2. Establish a firm foundation of classroom control and instruction that can easily be built off of as a first-year teacher. 

3. 3. Find a teaching job and enter the world of adults that have a regular stream of income.  
4. 
   

However, I feel that those goals leave out the heart of the matter and I find that most of my internal focus has been on the upcoming student teaching experience: I am very determined to leave my MT's classroom being the best teacher I can be at that exact moment. In the year that I spend under the tutelage of an experienced teacher I hope to establish an ease while dealing with classroom distractions and interruptions, enforcing classroom policies and procedures, and engaging students in the content while keeping the lesson and unit plan on track. If I leave my MT's classroom in May feeling confident in my ability to control a classroom, prepare and teach a lesson, and establish routines and procedures that make learning feasible then I will feel as if i have accomplished what I set out to do when I started the teaching program. Everything else can be refined and perfected through years of experience.

So as we move forward- good luck!