Julie Marks Field Experience and Classroom Activities

My experience in room 271 has been a very rewarding one at the least. My cooperating teacher has given me many opportunities to really get to understand and grasp the life of a teacher. It has been very interesting to get a glimpse into my future. I had been able to participate in classroom routines in my last semester in field experience as well, so it felt natural this semester when I was spending time in room 271. Every day I was given the opportunity to pass out papers and take attendance. I personally like the way that my cooperating teacher took attendance and I think that I would do the same thing in my future of teaching. She had a handout with slots for each students name in the set up of the classroom desks and if a student was late she would tilt the tab with the students name to show that they were tardy and if the student was absent, she would take out the students tab entirely and put it in a slot labeled absent. I think it is a very quick and affective way to take attendance with little disruptions. While spending time in a Biology classroom, I have been able to participate in various activities. I was able to help out in small group/individual work. My favorite part of this experience was helping the students with experiments. I was able to answer questions that the students had and help them complete their worksheets that went along with the lab. It was very rewarding to be able to answer questions correctly and help students understand the material! One example was when a student in the class didnt understand how to graph the information they had just recorded from their experiment. I was able to guide her in understanding that the graph needed was a bar graph. She then could understand how to label the X and Y axis. I went home very happy that day. Although I didnt personally make these displays, I was able to hang up posters that I thought aligned with what the students were learning at the given time. There are cabinets hung all around the classroom where the students would perform their experiments and I was able to hang the posters there during my cooperating teachers free periods. Something that I was very proud of was when my cooperating teacher suggested I help her make an activity that she could use in the future. I used this opportunity to create a worksheet that I would also use for myself when giving a lesson. My cooperating teacher loved the worksheet I created for genetic traits. She saved it on her computer and told me that she would definitely use it in the future after we both reviewed it. It was very nice to know that a current teacher liked my work and gives me confidence for the future. A few times I was able to converse with the head of the science department. The first and most influential time was during a lunch break. I was in the science faculty lounge where there were 4 other science teachers as well as the head of the department and I was overhearing and taking part in conversations about the new science regulations and the new teacher evaluations that are being put

into place. There was specifically one teacher who mentioned she was close to retirement that really did not like the new system of teacher regulations. The head of the department was checking in to make sure that the other teachers were also filling out their evaluations because he knew that the evaluations took a lot of time to fill out. It was very interesting to see the different opinions of current teachers of the new systems that are being tested of how to evaluate teachers.