Last week was a pretty good week at Travis. We started our second assessment of the semester covering everything we have learned about Formal, Functional and Perceptual regions. Every day im continuing to progress my teaching abilities. I’m more able to be more confident in what I’m going to say and how im going to teach for my 7th period class. I’m also getting WAY BETTER at being able to tie students names and faces together, which is really good for me as I do not remember any kids at all from last semester at Austin Achieve. I did perform my very first lesson and took over an entire day of classes. My CT took a personal day and left me in charge of Friday’s classes with my own lesson. It was hard trying to create a lesson for Friday but he gave me complete control of creativity. The students responded well to the lesson and were very pulled in to learn about hispanic heritage. Even though some students are not hispanic or latino I encouraged students to alter what it feels like to be Black, Iranian, Afghan etc. because I wanted every student to feel involved and connect with the lesson.
Mr. Murtagh does not believe in giving test because he believes they do not help students learning on trying to remember facts about what we taught them, instead we give projects. The last assessment we made powerpoints and now we are making skits with puppets. Each group represents a different region and different location. We have Mexico, Honduras and Afghanistan. The students have scripts they will read and each student will have a certain character to play. They will record themselves playing as their puppets while also reading their script. The script is a scaffolding exercise for students to be able to read and recognize the material in order for them to answer the questions on the back of the script asking about formal, perceptual and functional regions.
Communicating with the students in an effective, persistent and effective manner is something Im striving to perfect because I struggle with asking clearly effective questions because I feel like I write questions that make sense to me but not make sense to others. So every time students are working on worksheets of questions me and my CT come up with I walk around and ask students “how’s everything going? do any the questions seem confusing?” and most of the time we will get one or two students who do not get a question because of the format and in that case we’ll rephrase the question in a manner for that student or for the entire class in order to understand. The image I provided is an example of two questions we asked which was confusing to most of the students and even confusing to me. For the last question the answer was Landrones which is thief in Spanish labeling/stereotyping (perceptual regions) a certain group of people in a certain location.
History in the Making 