1.1.1 The town in which I am student teaching is very poor; you can see that from my chart.

Part A: The population of my town is 2,170 with 42.6% of the community living below the poverty line. I believe this will have the greatest impact on my teaching in this district. The students come from families who do not place a high value on education. The graduation rate here is only 67.5%. Students have been in a low-income school district for most of their schooling. The students reading scores are below average. One instructional strategy I plan on using is a lot of PowerPoints and visuals. The students seem to benefit more when I do the research and put it on a PowerPoint rather than having them read it from a book. If we do read from the book, then reading as a class helps them because some of the words they do not know or cannot pronounce. Giving the students the information before they read is helpful because then they understand the basics of what they are reading. One learning activity with this was a lesson in Economics on the different world economies. I gave them a lecture on traditional, market, command, and mixed economies and handed them a graphic organizer to fill in as we went through the chart. The students were able to reference their charts later for the test review as well as to help them with other classwork. This allowed for students to see the information in a table format so they could see it in front of them instead of flipping through the textbook to find the answers. Part B: The district factor that I feel will have the most important impact on students performance in the classroom is the per pupil expenditure. The district spends $9,097 on each student. That number seems like a lot but when you add up the cost of meals, textbooks, printing, and materials that does not leave a lot of room for additional services to be given to students to help them succeed. In order to make up for the money that cannot be spent on materials, I plan to use materials I can

bring in from home. I already keep pencils and notebook paper in the classroom. I will incorporate hands on activities that can involve the students and may the students think. These activities can be done as a group with the use of cooperative learning which will allow on the cost of printing and materials to be cut because the work can be turned in as a group effort. An example of a learning activity with this type of strategy is the lesson I taught on Universal Rights. I had the students read through the Declaration of Universal Rights and make a poster explaining 1 of the 30 rights. The students had to draw what the right meant. The students did extremely well with this activity and were able to draw the words they read which means they had to understand what the right was in order to do the activity. Part C: The school factor that will have the most impact on the students is student to teacher ratio. The ratio is 22.5 to 1 which compared to other schools is quite small. I will use this to my advantage. With the classes being smaller, I will be able to focus on individual students more who need a little more of a push to strive for excellence. This will also allow for more cooperative learning which I am a big advocate of. An example of a learning activity for a small class would be to have them work in small groups to come up with an answer. For example, in Economics we are playing a stock market game. Students, in groups, have to buy and sell stocks on the stark market. Every Tuesday, they check their stocks to see if they have lost or gained money. This activity is good because the classes are small enough so that we can break up into groups and I can watch each group closely and help them with their stocks if I need to. It is hard to do activities with bigger classes, so the classrooms here are just the right size to be able to do something more engaging. 1.1.2

Part A: The classroom factor that will have the most impact on student learning is the fact that three of my students have IEPs. These IEPs make it so that these students have to be given praise as much as possible for their work. Their IEPs also state that test reviews must be given two days in advance. PowerPoints have to be printed out and given to them and any other notes given must also be given to them beforehand. While their IEPs are not extreme, it still will have an effect on the class. Pop quizzes are out of the question unless I was to single these three students out, but with a class of only twenty students, I do not feel that would be in the best interest of the students. These students also perform at a lower level. I must adjust my lessons so that students will have adequate time to take notes if needed. I also have to pace my lessons so that I can allow for two days of review before a test. Because there are three students in the classroom on an IEP, I feel as though group projects through collaborative learning will be beneficial to them. An example of a learning activity is the Renaissance art activity I had my students work on. The class was given 10 minutes to talk with a partner about the paintings that were hung around the room. After the ten minutes, we got together as a class and talked about the differences between pre-Renaissance art and Renaissance art. This activity was helpful because the students were able to look at the drawings and could reference them when they were working on their postassessment. Part B: Based on my knowledge of student performance in the classroom, I know that most students only strive to pass. This means that 25% of my students are failing and only 10% actually care to make a grade higher than a C. Motivating these students to work harder is going to be the challenge. However, I plan to spend time planning engaging and interesting activities and lessons that will make them want to come to class and learn. I am an advocate of classroom participation and I feel as though that if I can get the students to participate more in the classroom instead of doing book work, then I can also get to learn. Evidence from my first

lesson I taught them proves this to be true. On their test review, they were able to answer the questions based on my lesson with 75% accuracy which is remarkable compared to the answers they got right on questions that they had simply read in the book and answered textbook questions. A learning activity that is an example of this is the lesson I taught on Renaissance art. In this activity, students were allowed to get up and move around the classroom. During the lecture, I referenced the artwork to the vocabulary terms in order to give them a visual. The students benefitted from this type of lesson because they had a visual aid to help them to remember. During the test, I hung the paintings back up so that they could see them as they were taking the test. 1.2.1. Part A: The resource chart can be found here. Two resources that I will use in my classroom are the access to the Promethean Board as well as access to Everfi for my Economics classes. The Promethean Board will be used a lot for my visual instruction. I will use the Promethean Board every day in order to give PowerPoint lectures from which the students will take notes and understand the materials we are covering. My students do not like to read. They have a hard time with it because most are so far behind on their reading levels. Having PowerPoints as visuals has proven to help and I will be providing them for my students. The second resource I will use is the Everfi computer program online. Everfi is a computer program for Economics. It is an 8 lesson long program that teaches students about Economics. There are stimulations within the program so that the students are able to get involved. Each student has his/her on login and every Friday we will go to the lab and work in Everfi. This will be beneficial for the students because they will be able to work at their own pace and will be able to use technology while doing it. Part B: In order to get the students involved in the lessons, I

like to relate the material to real world experiences in the arts or in sports. I also will reference towns and cities around them and people they may know in order to enhance my lessons. This helps the students because they can them relate the material to real world experience. So in order to teach my students through real world experience, I use my own personal examples to help them to understand. Because there are such a limited number of resources inside the school, I rely on myself to be a resource. An example of a learning activity in which I used this technique was in Economics. In Economics we were talking about a free-enterprise system. I told my students that in a free-enterprise system an entrepreneur takes risks and that their business may or may not succeed. In order to prove this, I gave them an example of my parents business that they started and how it didnt go as planned and we had to shut the doors. The students listened to my story and then understood that starting a business means taking risks and that the government cannot step in for any little store and help out when they are going under. This was an actual scenario and the students were able to learn from it. 1.2.2. Part A: This is the link to Student As Student Interest Survey. After reading through the surveys for all six of my classes, I realized that many of them have responsibilities outside of just school work. Most of them have to go home and have family responsibilities such as taking care of sick family members, younger siblings, and some of my students have children of their own. The ones not taking care of family members either play sports or have a job outside of school. I now realize why so many of them hate having homework. Because I do not want to see my students fail simply because they do not have time to do homework or study, I plan to leave a day in between the test review and a test to have a review game. A review game that I like to play is Jeopardy. This

allows for students to be involved in the classroom as well gives them time to study for the test. Part B: Student A is a very intelligent student. He has an A average in the classroom. However, according to his survey, he loves baseball. In order to get his interest, we will spend time talking about sports in different countries as we travel through History. For example, when we talk about the Ottoman Empire, we will talk about sports they played during the time. If I can engage his attention with sports then he is more likely to retain information about the country because he can think about the types of sports they played. 1.2.3. Part A: This is the letter I sent to parents of my students. The students in my classroom are both male and female. There are fourteen white students and five African-American students. There is also one Hispanic student. The socioeconomic status varies. The majority of the students are low-income students with only two or three of them being middle class. In order to reach both types of families, I have decided to make letters to be sent home to parents. On the letter, I explained who I am and what I will be doing in their childs classroom. At the bottom I listed my email address. All of the students parents may not have access to computers so the letter in hard copy form makes the most sense to reach the parents. However, with my contact information being listed at the bottom, this allows for those that do have a computer to email me. I also mentioned to my students to tell their parents that they may write me via the paper if they have any questions or concerns. Part B: This fosters communication between the parent, student, and myself because I gave the students the letter to give to their parents. This means that the students are able to read it as well as their parents so both the student and the parent can talk about

the letter. The parents can then talk to me directly through email or via their child if they have any questions or concerns. 1.2.4. Part A: One classroom rule that impacts the learning environment is that students may not have food out during class. This helps facilitate learning because students are not distracted by food or drinks during the lesson. This also helps with keeping the classroom clean so that the students will feel comfortable in the classroom. Part B: One technology rule within my classroom is that cell phones are not to be out at any time during class. This helps foster learning because students are not distracted by their cell phones. The students have to pay attention to what is going on in the classroom rather than what someone is saying via a cell phone text or snap chat. Part C: One behavior management rule is that you are not to talk when someone in authority is speaking. If you speak out of turn repeatedly you are given a quick-out. This means that you go straight to ISS no questions asked and remain in ISS the rest of the day. Having quick-outs fosters classroom management because the students do not want to be sent straight to ISS. This helps to keep the classroom in order if they get out of control.