Today Dr. Behrens made a very strong statement that I found quite interesting, “Assume positive intentions and be kinder than necessary.” I was really impacted by this quote, because it made complete sense. As educators we are going to face situations when we feel it’s everyone against us, and us against others. We are going […]

Today we talked about effective read alouds. Research has proven the “Red Robin Reading” and “Popcorn Reading” methods are not very effective with students. This is because the students can easily disengage themselves from the text because they are likely to read ahead and not focus on what is currently being read and students can […]

Today in class Dr. Behren’s had to leave class early but left working in our PLC groups to get our readers responses completed or finish our textbook questions. We had the option to leave early if we chose to, so after I did some of my textbook question I left for the day.

Today in class we did our mini lesson presentations. We were broken up into small groups which I really appreciated because I tend to get stage fright when speaking in front of my peers. I really enjoyed listening to my groups presentations because everyone came up with something unique and of interest to themselves. It […]

Today in class we learned about CHAMPS classroom management. CHAMPS stands for, Conversation, Help, Activity, Movement, Participation, and Success. Conversation covers on whether students can converse during the class, with whom they may converse, and for how long. Help is for how students are able to get your attention. get answers questioned, and what they […]

Today in class we learned about socratic seminar (aka fishbowl). Socratic seminar helps students develop deeper ideas. The students will read a text and then they create a sort of “round table” with 2 rows. There is a center circle and an outer circle and the ones in the center are the ones who speak […]

Today we centered the class around close reading. I learned the goal of close reading is to discover the underlying meaning. Different ways to encourage/help students achieve the goal of close reading is to provide them with tools when reading a text. Have them highlight, circle, make notes, etc. We watched a video of a […]

Today we focused on learning the essential meaning of the author. We read Hamlet and had to break down the behind his “To be or Not to be” poem. At first, our group was not able to decipher the author’s meaning because we struggled with the language used in the poem. Professor Behrens asked Chelsea […]

Today we shared some new young adolescent literature books. I think it’s cool for us to share different books with each other that we could potentially use in the future with our students. We also covered chapter 2 in our textbooks and discussed the chapter in our group. To end our day, we finished our […]

Today we started off class with a review over what we learned last week. Dr. Behren’s explained how important it is to review material from the previous class when retaining information and new knowledge. We also learned teaching strategies we can apply in the classroom. Some ideas given to us today were: Never dictate how […]