10 March 2010

A Question of How


It's Wednesday of my first week of student teaching, and I'm seeing something that will become an issue for me in the future. Both classes that I am in and observing are not structured in a way that is conducive to a typical Teacher Work Sample. In one class the students are coming and going as they need to throughout the day. They come to class and they do their work without much external structuring or prompts. The other class I'm observing is a transition classroom where the stuents are out of the academic lessons phase and into the life lessons phase; this is where they learn to be independent and self-sufficient.
Therefore, the issues becomes a quesiton of how to create a Teacher Work Sample with pre-, during, and post-assessments within these untraditional settings. Do I interrupt their set of processes and force them into a learning model that they've either moved past, or that does not work well for them? How do I pick a subject when all the students are doing individualized programs that are customized to each of them? It's not a question of IF I'll be able to do this successfully. It's a question of HOW I'm gonna be able to pull this off.

2 comments:

Justice Calo Reign said...

Maybe changing your operational definitions of some of those terms to match up with operations in each nontraditional classroom?

Joe B. said...

If I do anything well, it is adapting. The teachers I work with are more than willing to help me do what I need to complete this program. I'm just wanting to get a quick start on this project.