[nobe-l] Questions from the field.

[Valerie Gibson]

Hi,

I'm midway through my field experience, and I'm on information overload.  So just to give myself more information which will hopefully make life easier, I have some questions from the field that I wish to ask.

1.  What are some organizational strategies that you have. How do you organize papers of different students.  I don't have my own classroom, so if you could give me some tips for now (as a student) and later when I become a teacher, that would be great.

2.  What are your methods for getting instantatnious feedback? I understand some of you have students read their answers to you, but what I've experienced are second graders who will not read you EXACTLY what they have written.  How do you check this.  And then there's punctuation. How do you know if they've used it correctly.

3.  How do you structure your lessons, and what does that look like. I know every lesson may be different, so just an example.

4.  How do you have your students arranged in your classroom and why?

5.  I'm assuming you need readers for grading papers? Yes? No? How do you get them if you use them, and when do you have time to use them?

6.  How do you notice and call out students who are staring into space when they should be working?  

7.  Do you have any tips for effective time management, or does that just come with experience. I had to teach my first lesson a couple of days ago, and It's so easy to let time get away from you when you're teaching a lesson that's supposed to be X amount of minutes long, and your mini-lesson goes longer than you thought.

7.  Obviously this cannot be specific because it can apply across domains, but what are some mini-lesson structures that you use.  What do they look like. What teaching techniques do you use, and how do you know if students are still engaged or have tuned you out near the end.

8.  Do you have any experiences with the Smartboards? Are they accessible?

The way my CT does her lessons is that she'll call her students up on the "map rug", where she'll introduce the lesson, model examples, guide students through the lesson, and give them work to do. Sometimes they work at their desks. Sometimes they can work wherever, be it on the rug, in the reading part of the room, etc.  
The room seems fairly large to me. At least it was larger than I remember my classrooms being.  So how do you monitor all the students at once, especially if you're trying to help one.  

I know there's a converence call in April, and I suggested this for it, but I don't have to go to the field for a whole week because they're on spring break, so anything I could get in the mean time would be great.

I know this is a lot of questions, but hopefully it gives an idea of slightly overwhelming life is for me right now.  Any information that you could give would help.

Thanks.

PS: food for thought, but there are a few websites out there where teachers are video'd teaching a class. We use them for modeling purposes.  Perhaps someone should put one together to show us what it looks like for a blind person to teach totally non visually.  I know my CT and professor supervisor would absolutely love to see it.  They seem rather disappointed that they can't find any.   They keep saying how they'd love to see someone who was blind teach to see what it would look like in a classroom. They say it out of genuine curiosity, and I wish I could help them, and myself, with this.