The First Day of School

The first day of school, a day that new teachers are all to often not prepared for. During our lab last week we got to go through our first day of school, including testing out our expectations, procedures, and consequences. Looking back at how the day went I had several observations. 

I began the class by greeting the students at the door and trying to make connections with students that I had in "past classes". This went well, with the exception that everyone entered the room at once, so I did not get to greet each student individually as I would have liked to. Next the students worked on the bell work, which looking back on it, should not have been written by hand. There was some slight confusion at this point, but everyone caught on pretty soon and got right to work.

We then moved into our get to know you activity which involved starbursts, where each color represented a different question. I think that I will stick with this activity for my first day of school for now, I think it would be exciting for the students to recognize the diversity in our classroom.  The only thing I would do differently is, I would have a slide that stated the questions rather then me having them hand written. 

Next we transitioned into classroom expectations. This went fairly well, I think the students enjoyed being able to interact with the expectations and own them. We then went over the procedures and consequences. Once again for the procedures we had an open dialogue regarding what some of them meant and looked like. This concluded my beginning activities, and I moved on to the objectives for the day which I had written, but did not state as I should have. 

Other observations tha my peers made were that one student was constantly on their phone, a role that they were to assume,but I only mentioned to them once about putting it away. I like to think if we would have had an entire class period that the student would either have stopped using their cell phone because they now knew the expectations, or that I would have seen it and take further measures. 

In addition I wanted to explain the other challenges that we were presented with during this mock first day of class. During lab each person is also assigned a role to play, for example the role I selected at random was that of the person that shares to much, some of the other roles included the technologist and the class clown. This caused some disturbances at the beginning of my lesson with people not listening and throwing objects across the room. I directed my attention to these students by asking them to repeat the directions or steps that had just been stated. This was a fairly effective strategy, this time. but it got me thinking back to my EDTHP class and I know I need to revisit some other classroom management techniques and tips to be prepared to student teach.

Overall the lab went fairly well, with some minor changes to my lesson plan,signaling, and the addition of powerpoint slides I think it will really come together. 

Next week we will be working on interest approaches so check back to see what mess I get myself in to then.