1. Classroom Context: As you observe your cooperating teacher's classes, what do you notice about the classroom environment, the tone of the class, the nature of interactions between teacher-student and student-student, and the level of student engagement?

2. Classroom Management: What moves does your cooperating teacher make to engage students, keep them on task, redirect distractions/misbehavior, address issues, and avoid chaos? What would you like to mimic in your own teaching?

3. Personal Reflection: What is one fear or concern you have after your first week? What is one aspect of student teaching you are excited about at this point?

2. Student Engagement: What have you noticed about patterns of student engagement? Do you have whole classes that are consistently engaged and others not? Pockets of engaged students? What engagement strategies seem to work? What doesn't work? How will these observations influence your planning?

3. Personal Reflection: How are you feeling about taking over one or more classes? If you are nervous, what would help you to feel more prepared?

(PS - sorry, ~1/3 of this is me complaining about the sub)

1. Teaching Identity: We have discussed in the past some of the psychological challenges involved with shifting from "student mode" to "teacher mode." As you begin to teach classes independently, your role seems to change overnight. You are now the adult in the room with the responsibility/authority/expertise that goes along with that. Reflect on this new teaching identity. How is it going?

2. Pedagogy: As you are beginning to teach lessons independently, how are you measuring the “success” of a lesson? Level of student engagement? Evidence of learning via assessments (formative or summative)? Amount of participation? Written feedback from students?

3. Celebration: Describe a moment from this week that deserves to be celebrated - even if it was brief or seemingly inconsequential. Tell us something good! :) 

1. Differentiation: Tell us about the students in your edTPA class! What have you learned about their interests, their backgrounds, their academic strengths and needs, and their class personality? How has this information shaped your instruction and how have you adapted/composed your edTPA sequence with them in mind? 

2. Grading: Some of you have indicated that you are now responsible for grading student work. How is that going? What questions do you have about how to assign value to students' responses? Is it challenging to follow the system or approach that your cooperating teacher uses? What would you mimic and what would you change in your own classroom?

3. Open Question: What else would you like to discuss based upon your teaching this week?

1. As we talked about briefly in seminar this week, I wonder what you have learned about setting the purpose of each class and making sure that students understand the “why” behind what they are doing each day? How do you make sure that each activity doesn’t have a “because I said so” motivation and that students understand how it will benefit them? What does this look like in practice?

2. You are currently recording for edTPA (or are planning to record next week), so can you reflect on what you are learning about the gap between expectations and reality when you implement your lesson plans? In other words, how do you adapt your “ideal” lesson plans to the specific needs of your students without compromising the objectives of the original lesson plan?

3. Open Question: What else would you like to discuss based upon your teaching this week?

For your reflection this week, we want you to think about the type and quality of questions that you ask your students. We know some of the questioning strategies to avoid such as...

(a) Cold-calling - Asking questions without giving students much time to think (which benefits those who are quick thinkers but not others) or using questions as a form of punishment for students who aren't paying attention

(b) Pseudo-questions - Questions that pose as questions but are really teacher-designed to provoke a very specific answer (closed rather than open)

(c) IRE patterns - Teacher initiates, student responds, teacher evaluates response. How can we make sure that we as the teachers are not always the initiators and evaluators of every question?

With these "question patterns to avoid" in mind, we can conversely prioritize effective questioning strategies that (a) are open-ended, (b) provoke critical thinking, (c) are initiated by students, (d) encourage multiple perspectives, (e) encourage analysis/synthesis, (f) build from concrete to abstract, (g) connect to students' lives, (h) promote collaboration, etc. 

Keeping both of those categories of questions in mind, please reflect on the following:

1. As you reflect upon the questions you have incorporated into your lessons this week (and even those that arose organically), how would you characterize the type of questions that you typically ask? What types of responses do your questions elicit from students? 

2. In what ways would you like to improve your questioning strategies (or the role of questions) in your classroom moving forward? What might this look like?

3. Open Reflection: What else would you like to talk about based upon what happened in your classroom this week?

1. Learners:   Passive recipients 1--> 5 Active recipients

2. Learning:   Knowledge transfer 1-->5 Knowledge discovery

3. Learning Process:  Linear 1--> 5 Recursive

4. Teacher:   Expert, organizer, guide 1--> 5 Motivator, facilitator, coach

5. Classroom environment:   Structured, orderly  1--> 5 Open, dynamic

6. Outcome:   Learning mastery 1--> 5 Learning process

7. Evaluation:   Teacher-constructed, summative 1--> 5 Student-selected, formative

1. As you consider the edTPA work that you have done so far, we want you to consider what aspects of edTPA planning and/or implementation seem beneficial to you. In other words, apart from the high-stakes, something-we-have-to-do aspect of edTPA, how might it improve the quality of your teaching? What does it make you consider that you may not otherwise think about?

2. Open question: tell us about a rose (high point) and a thorn (lower point) from your week! Are there any other questions you'd like to discuss?

1. We'd like for you to describe a lesson that went so well this week that you thought, "I wish Dr. Mitchell/Holmes (Faullin/Brown) had seen that!" Describe the lesson and talk about why you believe it was so successful.

2. For the rest of your reflection time this week, choose your own topic. What’s something that has happened in your teaching/ your classroom over the past several weeks that you would like to talk about? You might frame it around a particular question, or just make it a more general reflection.

   
   

(1) how your practice has improved,

(2) what you are still working on, and

(3) something for which you have consistently received praise.

Because you will be reflecting on your own teaching in our last seminar and in your final evaluation conference, the focus of this reflection will be on what you have noticed in your observations of others' classrooms now that you have "teacher goggles" on. What have you noticed about the dynamics of other classrooms, different teaching strategies, assessment designs, student participation/ engagement, and/or classroom management approaches?

We are proud of each of you! Looking forward to your thoughts!