Karin Stefans Final Clinical Report December 15, 2009 Description Over the course of the semester, my teaching

partner and I taught eight lessons to a class of twenty-four fifth graders at Thomas B. Jeffery Elementary School. The class was primarily caucasian, with a few Hispanic students and no African American students. We taught various lessons in the content area of language arts. Our topics included: how to write a personal narrative, identifying common and proper adjectives, an introduction to nouns, a development of nouns, an introduction and research activity for The Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth George Speare, comprehension of chapters one and two of The Sign of the Beaver, a vocabulary review, and creating a story map for My Prairie Christmas by Brett Harvey. Throughout these lessons, my partner and I used various means of engaging the students, including using the classroom document camera, having group discussions, requiring individual writing, and orchestrating whole class activities and games. Overall, I found the class to be very cooperative and eager, and this experience proved to be very beneficial in my education as a pre-service teacher.

Lessons Learned The first lesson I learned in my clinical experience was how to approach another teachers class. I fully understand the importance of establishing procedures in the classroom, especially procedures for discipline and getting the attention of the class. However, it is very difficult to come into a situation where such procedures have already been established. I did not think about the fact that I should educate myself on this particular teachers method of focusing

the students attention, and I assumed that the students would start to understand when I wanted them to be quiet. This, of course, was not the case. It was several lessons into the semester when I finally became frustrated with either raising my voice or standing silently waiting for the students to clam down. I asked a student during a particularly noisy activity how the classroom teacher usually got the class to stop talking, and he told me that she usually raised her arm in the air. I began using this technique, and it worked well. During our vocabulary review lesson later on in the year, one of the students clapped a pattern during the group activity and the entire class fell silent and repeated the pattern. I wish that I had developed this strategy earlier in the semester, and I realized that my classroom management skills would have been much better if I had done what I would have done had this been my own class; establish some procedures. In the future, I will make sure to ask my cooperating teachers what kind of procedures they have, but I will also implement my own ways of getting the students attention if I feel that they would be valuable. This experience has certainly reemphasized the importance of establishing procedures for when I have my own class. One of my favorite experiences of my clinical was during our final lesson. We were reading My Prairie Christmas by Brett Harvey and were creating a story map so that the students could identify and understand the themes of the book that had to do with the spirit of Christmas. Our cooperating teacher planned to have the students read multiple holiday stories over the course of the week so that they could write their own holiday story on Friday. When we created our lesson for the middle of the week, we wrote questions for the students to answer and discuss in groups. These questions asked students about some personal experiences that the main character of My Prairie Christmas had to experience. After the students had answered and

discussed the questions, we read the book and filled in the story map. We then asked the students to revisit the questions that they had answered before reading, but this time to think about the questions from the point of view of the main character of the story instead of through the filter of their own lives. As the students did this, one boy called out, Oh, now I know why you had us do those questions! There are like stuff in the story!. This observation proved to me that the student was starting to draw connections between his own life and the book. He understood that there was a connection between the experiences in the book and his own experiences, so the book was no longer just another story. When I saw that such a strong connection that was being developed, I realized just how important those pre-reading questions had been. The students had not had any problems identifying the themes of the book, and while I had attributed this to the fact that they were better at analyzing books than we thought, it is possible that we created good questions that activated the students schema, making the themes we wanted to emphasize obvious to the students. Whether or not the students would have had as much success without the pre-reading questions is impossible to know, but I am convinced that we helped at least one student find true personal meaning in the story, and that is reason enough to seriously consider pre-reading questions for future lessons. Furthermore, this experience showed me just how important it is that students can connect their lives with their assignments; they stay much more engaged, and just seem to enjoy the lesson more. I learned that the students really liked to talk about their own experiences, so adding a personal reflection aspect to a lesson could often be very beneficial. When the students read chapters one and two of The Sign of the Beaver, which describe many of the chores and responsibilities that the main character faces while he is left alone waiting for his family to

return, I had the students brainstorm how they would feel if they had to take care of themselves without their family, and what kind of responsibilities they currently had and would have if they were left alone. The students really enjoyed this discussion, and proved to me that they understood both the literal story and its general ideas when they wrote a journal entry as if they were home alone for weeks at a time. Through this activity, I learned that making connections with a text is essential for engaging students and increasing their knowledge. In another lesson, I learned just how creative students can be when they are forced to think outside the box. We created a lesson to help the students review vocabulary before their vocabulary test, and to do this we divided them into groups and gave each group three vocabulary words. The students were to create a skit that showed the meaning or use of the words, without using the words themselves. The goal was for the rest of the class to be able to associate the proper vocabulary words with the skit. This was actually a rather challenging activity, because the vocabulary words were not really grouped by any similar categories, and the students had never done anything like this before. However, the class rose to the occasion, and I was very impressed with how well many of the groups did with this rather open-ended assignment. I did notice that the students could have used a little more time to work in their groups. I realized that students can be very creative when they are given some freedom in their assignments, and when they are given enough time to fully explore their creativity. I believe that such experiences are helpful for helping students become strong individual thinkers who do not always need to follow a prescribed way of doing something. However, as wonderful as creative and abstract thinking is, there are certain situations in which more direct instruction and scaffolding is the best route. Oftentimes, students need to be

provided with plenty of examples on how to do something, and must then have guided practice before they are ready to complete the assignment on their own. There is not enough time for students to discover everything on their own, and for many topics it is appropriate for students to learn good skills so that they do not continue to do something inefficiently. For example, my partner and I used scaffolding in our lesson on writing a personal narrative. We described what a personal narrative was, read the students an example of a personal narrative from a book, and then analyzed the qualities of the narrative. We brainstormed personal narrative topics as a class, and then had the students begin writing. There was some scaffolding in the lesson, but the next time I teach personal narrative writing, I will include another example of a personal narrative (written by me), and will incorporate guided practice by demonstrating the writing process and writing a narrative in front of the class and using their suggestions. I learned many things through my clinical experience, and I believe that I have become a much better teacher because of this experience. I really enjoyed working with fifth-graders because of their energy and creativity, and I will not forget my experiences in the classroom.