Mollie Deuel's Teaching Portfolio

Dessert​

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Personal Reflection & Next Steps

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How does this overall project reflect your growth towards your personal goals and in other areas of classroom management?

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This project reflects everything that I have learned in EDIS 5030 and wish to apply to my future classroom in regards to my classroom management style.  While I have not agreed with every tactic and anecdote we’ve gone over in this course, I can confidently say that the majority of the things that I have learned will help me immensely in the future when I get my own classroom.  There are examples and narratives that I have thought through very thoroughly for this project that I never would have considered before taking this classroom management class and being assigned this project.  Before doing this project one of the things that I was most nervous about when attaining my own classroom, was figuring out how to set up my goals and expectations for the class and how to convey them to students and their families during the first week of school.  I know that the first week and even the first day you have your students can influence your relationships and classroom culture for the remainder of the year and completing this project has made me confident that I will be able to set up my class in a way where students will understand my goals for them as learners and show my students that I want to build strong healthy relationships with them.  One of my personal goals for this project was to come out of it knowing how I will structure the first few days of school and how I would go about conveying my goals for the course I’m teaching to my students.  I also wanted to have a toolbox full of resources that I could use for building relationships with my students as well as tools for building relationships between students and their peers.

 

I think some of the most important takeaways from my research and self-reflection during this project, is that there needs to be intention behind every classroom management tactic you employ, as well as a thorough plan for conveying your expectations to students.  I also have come to realize that the thing I value most when setting up my future classroom, is building relationships with and between my students and their families and I am confident that I will be able to do that now.

 

What specific resources and learning experiences (both in this class and beyond) have helped to foster your growth?

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I would say the best resource has been having Dr. Pease and Katie not necessarily teaching us a laundry list of ideas, but facilitating conversations in our class about different classroom management techniques as well as prompting us to do a huge amount of self-reflection.  They did a great job at conveying the importance of having intention behind all of your actions and that there is no one correct way to set up and execute your classroom management plan.  I also think they did a great job at providing us resources for us to sift through and emphasized that we should utilize only the techniques that we really buy into.  I found the Middle and Secondary Classroom management textbook to be particularly helpful as well as other online resources they provided.  The Pinterest board for the physical classroom layout was very useful and I now know that Pinterest has an infinite amount of resources for teachers.  I also really like the various vignettes that were provided in class from time to time that would allow us to apply some of the things we have learned to specific situations. I also found it especially useful to collaborate with my classmates during class, so that we could bounce ideas off each other and reflect together about things we have read about or seen put into action in actual classrooms.  The book analysis assignment was really great, because it made me sit down and read an entire book where students were able to convey their opinions about how they like a teacher to run the classroom (Fires in the Bathroom).  I also bought three of the other books on Amazon that I felt I could continue to learn more from and spoke to my style of classroom management. I intend to read them over the next year.  They are Teach Like a Pirate: Increase Student Engagement, Boost Your Creativity, and Transform Your Life as an Educator, by Dave Burgess; See Me After Class: Advice for Teachers by Teachers, by Roxanna Elden; and For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood...and the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education, By Christopher Emdin.

 

I have also had the pleasure of observing and helping out in many classrooms over the last year as well as a chance to substitute teach for two years in Syracuse, NY and one year here in Charlottesville.  I think that through substitute teaching I learned how to interact with students on a daily basis, but what I was missing was how to think through creating a comprehensive behavior management class with intentional techniques that could be implemented throughout an entire school year to ensure my students success in my classroom.  In my 388 and 488 placements over the last year I have been able to observe experienced teachers and learn about their classroom management philosophies.  I saw a wide range of tactics, including some that I feel that I would never use in my own classroom.  I observed student – teacher relationships that were really strong and productive, but I also saw relationships that seemed very strained and negative.  I can only hope that I have taken away the more beneficial tactics from my mentor teachers and have applied them to not only this project, but to my philosophy and plan that I will implement once I get my own classroom.

 

What challenges have you faced in the development of this project?

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I think the biggest challenge for me was deciding and articulating on paper (or website in this case) what techniques and methods I intend to use and my rationale for using them.  I also think it was difficult for me to begin each of the components because I felt like they were so many options that I could use for each component and I didn’t know how to narrow them down so that I could clearly, concisely, and effectively convey what I intend to do.   I know that this is a very accurate representation of how new teachers set up their classrooms, i.e. with very little direction, but I am a very indecisive person and spent many hours just thinking about what I wanted to say and what artifacts I wanted to include.  If I were to do this project over I would have taken more time earlier in the semester to articulate things for each of the components around the same time we covered them in class.

 

What are some areas for your future growth and development in relation to classroom management, and what is your plan for addressing these areas in the coming months/years?

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I think all teachers, whether they are in their first year or thirtieth year, will always have room for future growth and development.  I think that in terms of what I need to do next is take the tactics that I have decided to implement and test them out.  At the beginning middle and end of all of my years of teaching I would like to take time to reflect on things that worked and things that didn’t work and then work through ways I can improve on or change the things that didn’t work.  I realize that I probably won’t be able to apply most of the things I have covered in this project while I am student teaching next year, but I am excited to observe another teacher for a very comprehensive amount of time and I intend to update my toolbox with techniques I learn and love in my mentor teacher’s classroom.  I also have subscribed to Edutopia’s Facebook page and have been and will continue to read about new and old revelations in the classroom management realm.

      As far as specific things I still need to work on I would say the biggest is having a logical rationale for each technique I plan on utilizing as well as a good way for conveying those rationales to students and their families.  I think that this will come with more time spent in the classroom and I will hopefully be able to work on that using my observations and experiences from my student teaching experience next fall.  Whenever I have my own classroom and figure out the actual context of my school and students, I will script out what I would like to say to my students during the first few classes.  I’ve learned through this course that scripting is a great way to help think through rationales and statements and to make sure that I am actually saying the things that I intend to say.