Practicum Plan

I have listed many learning goals on my Practicum Plan and I would like to achieve all these before the end of the semester. My first goal is use differentiated instruction more in the classroom. In my classroom so far I have used a Smart Board every day. In the upcoming weeks I want to learn how to use the Smart Board in different ways to teach my lesson or my mentor teacher’s lesson plans. Another goal I have is improving my classroom management. My classroom management has improved a lot over the first few weeks of teaching. At first I had a lot of problems with students having side conversations while I was teaching. I realize now that when you first get a group of students you must be very strict then you can back off a little bit once you have earned their respect. Now that my classroom management is improving it is easier to ask the students off topic questions then relate it to the material and keep the students on task.

One thing I added to my plan was create more organized lesson plans and have back up plans for my lessons. I planned a whole lesson on the American Civil War; I was informed by my teacher that we would be in the computer lab the whole week. When I arrived on school on the following Monday I was told we would not be in the computer lab at all and I would have to start my lesson today and redo all of my lesson plans. It was frustrating at the time but a good lesson for me. It taught me that I need to have a back plan in case something like this would happen again. Overall I have been on a good pace with completing my activities. I would like to get a lot more done before Spring Break so I can focus on my weakness in actual teaching.