My Goals for Spring 2014

Blog post 1     

My Goals for Spring 2014

·         Write a brief paragraph introducing yourself to the blogging world ·         Review the course learning objectives in the syllabus, the COE professional teacher dispositions, and your own reflections from past clinical and course experiences and map out at least four goals that you carry for yourself for this semester. What do you want to focus on? Improve in? Learn about? Think deeply as this will guide your work in this final clinical experience.

My name is Cate O’Bert. I am 22 years old. I am from Joliet, Illinois and currently am a senior at Illinois State University.  I am an early childhood major and have always wanted to teach first or second grade. I work at a daycare in Bloomington, Illinois in the preschool room. I love early childhood ages and am looking forward to becoming a teacher in this field.

                My first goal I have for myself would be to learn more about the function of culture and home language and how it relates to inside the classroom. I want to learn more about how children’s lives at home and their culture effects how they learn on a day to day basis. I feel I will learn more about this in TCH 294 through experiences in my clinical and through assessments done through other courses. In my past clinical experiences I saw how much a child’s home life and culture affects their school life. I want to know as a teacher how do I accommodate for those differences. When I go into clinical this year I am going to ask and observe how my CT accommodates on a daily basis. In one of my past clinical experiences, in a preschool classroom, one of the children spoke a majority of Spanish and the teachers didn’t seem to do much about accommodating each lesson. The teachers would try demonstrating the activity, but sometimes the little girl wouldn’t understand what was going on. I want to know as a teacher how I would help that child in an early childhood setting. This is my goal because there are several different languages and cultures around the world and I want to know how to be prepared for those situations.

                My second goal is to improve on selecting and interpreting formal and informal assessments. I learned a great deal about assessments last semester, but I feel I have a lot to improve on. I was told which assessment to use throughout the semester in specific situations. I want to improve on being able to know which assessment to use and when to use it. I feel this is a big objective for teachers to undertake before going out into the field. In the course this objective is important to me because I want to work with my CT on learning from her and helping her complete assessments. My cooperating teacher last semester was very confident in me to pull her students aside and work one on one with them for assessments. I feel by the end of this semester I will feel more confident in my assessment practices as a teacher. Taking this course and TCH 274 will help me do that.

                My third goal is to focus on knowing the importance of my own role as a professional in my behavior. I want to focus on this objective because I believe I will be a role model for these students in my clinical this semester even though I will only be there for one semester. I need to realize my behavior is always being watched even inside the classroom and especially inside my clinical classroom. I believe I do a good job at being very professional in all settings, but I want to really focus on this during clinical this semester. After leaving clinical last semester I realized how much of an impact I made on those students even though I only saw them once a week for a few months. I want to show the students I meet this semester I am a good role model and someone they can talk to for the time period I am there. I know I will learn that through this course and my other courses this semester.

                My fourth goal for this semester is to learn how to layout my future classroom in a way that meets the needs of all the children inside my classroom. I am looking forward to learning this through this course and other courses because it is such an important aspect inside a classroom. I have had to come up with a classroom layout before, but never really considered children with special needs when doing so. In my past clinical experiences I never saw a great classroom setup that I could use as a reference. I am hoping to learn this semester from my cooperating teacher how she set up her classroom and why. By the end of this semester I will be more confident in setting up a classroom to meet the needs of all children and much more.

                My fifth and final goal for this semester is to improve on implementing lesson plans inside the classroom. I will be practicing this a few times this semester which I am looking forward to doing so. I want to learn how to make each lesson engaging, but be able to manage the class at the same time. Professors from my past experience have taught me these things in a few ways, but there is always more to learn. When I have implemented lessons in the past I felt I did a good job, but was lost at some points. I would get nervous and lose my train of thought, so I want to become more confident in my teaching abilities. In this course this semester we will focus on classroom management tools to use for this, which I know will help me. I hope by the end of this semester I will be able to implement a lesson in the classroom confidently and correctly.