Personal Reflection: My Experience In The Classroom

Imagine this, you feel the well-worn leather sticking to your legs while your eyes jump from one friend to another. It’s the weekend, and there are probably a million other things that you could be doing, but it’s raining outside, and you secretly enjoy being in the chair. The chair that has seen you and your friends all take turns playing teacher and grading assignments over the past couple of years. Even though you spent hours at school, you enjoyed coming to your friend’s house-- especially when you were picked to sit in the chair. This person who secretly loved the chair would be me. Those weekends were what started my dreams of being a teacher, and throughout the years, experiences and courses reiterated that teaching is the career path

While at Winthrop I was required to take a course named HMXP. HMXP, also known as Human Experience, is where students will find academic engagement and intellectual challenge through their own written and oral responses to mature interdisciplinary readings. This course experience directly corresponds to Standard 2- Learning Environment- Element 3- the teacher candidate promotes positive social interaction and a sense of community in the learning environment. I can remember walking in the first day of class and all the desks were connected in a square which promoted positive interaction. Over the course of the class we were required to respond to discussions about views that may have been differing from our own but still in a respectable manner. Discussions were facilitated about race, religion, and other topics that had the ability to turn sour if talked about with other people. I was able to express my opinion and see where other student’s opinions may have come from with their background. The conversations that we had in this class also extended to outside of the classroom. When seeing people on campus, we would stop and talk for a few minutes then go on about our day. This experience has influenced my perception of teaching because the professor was the one who initiated the facilitations of the discussion and said from the very first day what she expected out of each person in the class. That is something that I

My field setting was in a second grade classroom, and my student had a 504 plan. My student was behind in multiple areas, but the one he struggled with the most was language. The components of literacy instruction I used to help the student were phonics and vocabulary development. The student had not mastered his kindergarten sight words and the evidence based practices that I found appropriate to help aid in the student’s lesson was Direct instruction with the use of flashcards. The flashcards had the sight words on them and we used discrete trials to figure out what ones he knew and which ones he didn’t know. From those two piles we continued with the intervention with scaffolding the words he didn’t know into the pile with the words he did know. If he didn’t know the word we would stop and sound out the letters to complete the word. If he got it right with the help, it was placed on top of the did not know and then would be tried again. Throughout this lesson by collecting baseline data and data after intervention, the intervention was successful. This experience has influenced my perception of teaching because as a teacher you are not the only influence, there are also many other influences that go into how well the