When I finished the high school portion of the CSU education program I

left Rocky Mountain High School feeling as if Id never be ready to teach a

classroom full of students. I started the semester of student teaching
believing I Just needed to stick with the program in order to graduate and get
my diploma. What I experienced at Blevins Middle School turned out to be
leagues better than the grim predictions that I had believed were in store for
me. The semester started off with me in low spirits, but very quickly the
experiences I had grown to expect were turned on their heads.
Being present at the school every day enabled me to establish genuine
and enduring relationships with my co-teacher and students, which in turn
was the primary cause for the reinvigoration in teaching that I experienced
this semester. In fact, establishing lasting relationships was one of the few
aspects that went well at the onset of the semester. I had miles of
improvement to make in classroom management, lesson planning, and
lecturing, and while I have made considerable improvements there are still
steps I need to take in order to be an adequate instructor.
At the beginning of the semester my classroom management was
extremely lacking, as I could rarely quiet the 8th graders, let alone the 7th
graders, without the help of my cooperating teachers. Another aspect of
management I had trouble with was the process of effectively redirecting or
disciplining students. However, as the semester progressed, the relationships
I established made classroom management far easier as the mutual respect
between student and instructor was enough presence to make me an active

authority. The final class period of the day really allowed me to hone in my
classroom management skills, as coming back from lunch I really could only
think of a 7th grade class as being more of a handful.
In terms of my skill in lesson planning, accommodations, and lecturing,
my skills in this cluster of aspects progressed collectively, as when I
improved one the others improved in turn. My lesson planning was weak, but
as I needed to create a lesson plan for every lesson I taught, the continual
exposure to the CEP lesson plan greatly increased my skill in identifying the
intricacies needed to teach a lesson. As I put more thought into drafting
adequate lesson plans, my lectures, which were actually planned at this
point, flowed smoother and were engaging enough to keep the classs
attention for a good amount of time. Finally, my continued practice of
drafting lesson plans allowed me to put more time into thinking about how to
modify assignments to better fit the cognitive abilities of numerous numbers
of student skill levels. A class with a big population of integrated services
students greatly helped me improvement accommodation and modification
skills that were sorely lacking. All of these classes were comprised of 30
unique students, and all taught me things I thought Id never be able to
accomplish or learn.
If I were to approach student teaching in a different light, I would
change a lot of aspects I was in control of, and very few of the external
factors. The students, environment, faculty, and co-teachers were all things
that I had no control over, and while each proved to be a challenge at one

point or another during the semester, I would never change a thing as I

believe nothing prompted me to learn more than the challenges that the
these external factors projected. The greatest thing that I would change,
would be the mindset that I had when I entered the school at the start of the
semester. I stated before that I was entirely pessimistic following the
education 450 class, but I believe if I had been more optimistic from the
start, my experience with student teaching would have been even more
rewarding than it already has been. Finishing up the semester my goal is to
get a good feel of how a school year is officially wrapped up, in the sense of
management, discipline, relationships, lesson planning, and continuation.
Following this semester of student teaching I plan to spend my first year
post-graduation subbing to further improve my skills while I search for a
permanent position in a school that I can call my home.