(Originally Posted 2/10/21)
A lot has happened in the last few weeks! I finally got my Demonstration Teaching (DT) assignment! That's commonly called Student Teaching, but the concept is the same. I get the chance to try my skills, knowledge and get feedback. I super excited to get going with this. Constructive criticism is so helpful and necessary.
On Monday, I officially started DT. My host teacher is fantastic and I can't wait to learn more from her. I already feel like I am learning a lot. A few of the things we've discussed are making sure students are on-task and not filling the void. I can easily talk to fill up a pause, but it's really important that the students respond to questions. We are going to do a little co-teaching tomorrow and we talked about how we should be careful not to build the lesson in depth between us-- it's really easy for two teachers to build off one another, but at the 6th grade level, we really don't need the lesson to get too deep. It will be more valuable in the case of students not answering the teacher's question if the co-teacher reframes the question instead of answering it.
I'm going to try to blog a bit as a go through the next 12 weeks because looking back, I know this will be a valuable to resource for myself!