Interaction Reflection

My interaction with the students in the classroom was an anticipation guide to prepare them and amp them up for reading To Kill a Mockingbird. I prepared my anticipation guide by looking at other guides and using statements I really liked; I also tweaked a few I found on the same guides. I also brainstormed a few statements of my own, using the other examples or statements from the guides as warm-ups to jog my brain. After I had a sizeable list, I did a process of elimination by answering the agree/disagree portion and then trying to put into words why I felt the way I did. There were some statements that made the cut while a few did not; not so much because they did not make sense but because I felt they were less applicable to connecting my students’ lives and the book. In essence, I could not find a way to tie the cut examples into my students’ lives, therefore making the anticipation guide easier for them to answer. My next step, after feeling confident with the content of my guide, was to figure out time and when long the class would need to do whatever activities I had planned. The classes at this particular high school are fifty minutes in length (with seven class periods), so I had to plan accordingly. I planned roughly 10 to 15 minutes—based on how fast the students would get through the guide. I knew I wanted them to do partner work, and they also had to answer a part 2 question after they were done with their partner work, which I thought would take around 20 minutes—15 minutes for discussion of all of the statements with a partner and 5 minutes to write a paragraph for part 2. So that brought me to a half-an-hour or so with 20 minutes to spare. My cooperating teacher said that she normally has them sit in large circles...

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...d change is that I would have liked to have my cooperating teacher there. While I understand that I may not have another teacher present in my own classroom when I implement an anticipation guide, I will at least know the dynamics of my own classroom. My cooperating teacher would have been able to give a lot of input on the statements and would have challenged the students more. Also, because she is the regular teacher in the classroom, she understands the dynamic of the classroom and how her students function. She would have also been able to add input when I was explaining the time period and the plot line of the novel. Otherwise, I feel that the activity I had planned went the way I expected and while I had to nudge some students to complete the worksheet or to attempt to explain their reason, I feel that would happen in any case to any teacher, new or seasoned.