Being a Student and a Teacher: A Student Teaching Experience

Warm up - Review past material to help with the upcoming lesson.  My cooperating Teacher was sitting in the front of the room observing the students.  This is a good time for the students to recall past material and make sure that they still understand it.  The repeated retrieval also helps the students with the recall of material when it comes to the test.  Most of the students sit and do the warm up everyday.  During this time one student seemed distraught so my CT talked to them and checked to make sure he was doing okay.  5 min.   Warm up  instruction- This was time that we took to reteach some aspects of the warm up.  The TV was not working, it would not display the step by step instructions of how to do the problems.  So instead my CT stood at the board and wrote it all up and explained it.  She called on students so they could tell her the next step.  There was a couple of times that no students were ...

When walking into the classroom for the first time, there was not much that caught my eye.  It appeared to be a "normal" math classroom.  The kids sit at tables that are in rows all facing the front of the room.  There is a teachers desk in the back corner and in the front of the room.  The front wall of the room is covered in marker boards and a large flatscreen TV.  One side wall of the room has cabinets and the other has a pasteboard and windows.  The back of the room has two desks with room around them.  Upon further inspection there was some aspects of the room that caused me to think a little bit more.   The students are seated at tables.  There are two students at each table and four tables in each row.  My cooperating teacher (CT) said she would like them to be in clusters of two or three tables but the students said they would rather not do that.  Their reasoning was that not all of them would be facing the front of the ...