As of today, I have completed my first two weeks of student teaching at A. A. Stagg High School! I began last week during the first two institute days at school. Officially, my student teaching experience wasn’t supposed to begin until yesterday. However, after communication with my two cooperating teachers, I was allowed to begin early in order to further my teaching experience at the fastest possible rate.
The first few days were filled with meetings with various groups, such as the division as well as the social studies department. The third day was similar because I only briefly met the transfer students who were joining my classes for this year. For reference, in District 230, the first day of school is reserved for Freshmen and transfer students; because I am teaching five sections of US history, which is a Junior class, I had very few students on this day.
The last two days of the first week primarily consisted of meeting students and getting to know them a little bit. On top of this, I did a little bit of observation with my teachers for the very light lessons that they had planned. Beginning this week, however, I was much more involved in the processes of planning as well as teaching students. My classes with Maggie Smith consisted of small projects that the students would work on. Monday was primarily about geography, such as where the states are and some additional important information about the US, such as where the Mississippi river is. Tuesday through Thursday consisted of students working together on a group project based around Native American tribes in the colonial era. The students then presented their research to the class today, where I was able to grade them and ask followup questions about their presentations.
In Mike Slifko’s classes, we quickened the timeline up a little bit. Because Mike and I share the same planning period, there is a lot of collaboration that we do when it comes to the lessons that we teach. He and I work together to plan the lessons and then we both tag in and out with teaching. We progressed from the time of the early settlers at the beginning of the week all the way to the Boston Massacre today. This lesson was also extremely important because it was the first lesson that I taught entirely on my own. I really enjoyed teaching the students and interacting with them in the classroom. One issue is that one of the classes is extremely quiet. It can be difficult to get them to participate in the classroom discussions and most of them will not work on assignments together even when permitted. On top of all of this, they do not talk very much to each other at the beginning or the end of classes. Because of this, it is my goal to get the class to liven up before I leave in December. This will help the kids to progress their understanding of history much better than the state that they are currently in.
The final major milestone that I have achieved in this time period is that I have begun the process of volunteering to coach the Stagg Chess Team! I have been a massive chess player for the last six years or so of my life. I also am a pretty decent chess player in my opinion. Because of this, I decided to reach out to Aron Kopera, the head coach of the team, to help them out with their team. The coaches all seemed eager for me to join them, and I made the official decision to join them by contacting the District 230 HR.
Overall, my first two weeks of student teaching have been amazing and I am extremely glad for the experiences that I have already had in the classroom. My two cooperating teachers are both extremely good at what they do and are also some of the nicest people that one could wish to work with. I have very high expectations for the upcoming semester at Stagg as well as high expectations for myself in the classroom!