Final Reflection

Mariah Smith

Final Reflection Paper

            Today was my last day of student teaching and I write this reflection paper keeping in mind where I have come from as a person and as a teacher. Thankfully, I am confident that I have had much growth in these two areas of my life and I realize that there is lots of room for me to grow in the future. To begin, I first want to tell you how I have reached my goals of student teaching. Then I will tell you some other major things that I have improved on that I wasn’t expecting to. Finally, I will finish with setting more goals in my future teaching roles.

            One of my goals before I came here was to learn about new curriculums, different cultures’ ways of teaching, and compare it to what I have learned about the Montana Common Core Standards. KIS is an International Baccalaureate school, which means that the school is apart of a program that is found and recognized around the world. I had heard of the program before I came because Hellgate High School just implemented it with what seems success. Within this program I worked mostly with the Middle Years Program (MYP) for grades 6-10 and there are a ton of differences between MYP and MCCS. As I said in my mid-term reflection, there is a huge difference in assessing students. MYP uses criterion for every assignment and MCCS does not require teachers to grade in a certain way but is usually used in a traditional A, B, C, D grading system. The topics covered in both systems are about the same over the high school years but to me it seems that the MYP does a wider variety of topics over a school year. The original American curriculum traditionally splits up topics to be covered in specific years i.e. only Algebra during grade 10. Another difference between the two is that MYP requires extra things from the students that I feel prepares them for higher education better than what is found in Montana. To explain this more I would like to tell you about a requirement of all tenth graders, Personal Project (PP). For the PP a student has to research about a subject, business, or a trade and then must put what they learned about into action either by building or creating something. Eventually the students finish the project by presenting it to the community and explaining what they had done in their project. I really like this academic exercise for students because they learn lots of study, research, and learning techniques from it. The PP is meant to prepare students for future work in their academics at a deeper level than homework and tests. I would implement a similar project in my own classes to give students a chance to work on a big project. In all, the different curriculum I have taught from has its perks and also frustrates me as a teacher and as a learner. In all, I have learned how to have different assessments than a typical math test. Also, I have had the chance to learn how to grade effectively using criterion guidelines.

            I am so happy that I got involved with extra-curricular activities at KIS this last semester. By being involved with both a Math club and dancing club, I got the chance to get to know more students other than my tenth graders and I got to know them better than just having them in academic classes. My goal this semester was to get involved with these activities and then figure out how to balance my time between my personal social life and school life when being involved. The unique experience of teaching at a boarding school provided me with many opportunities of balancing my work and personal time. I discovered that spending time with students outside of school is very beneficial towards gaining a stronger relationship with students. With this said, there were times that I felt being involved was counterproductive because I emotionally was not there in the activity in response of being tired or overworked. These moments occur when there are extra things happening at school such as projects for students or lots of tests to grade. As soon as I scheduled my extra activities during times that weren’t as busy, my stress levels decreased and I enjoyed myself while hanging out with the students. I say that finding a balance between school events and social events out of school-day times is a challenge and takes a few months to figure out completely.

            By the end of the semester, I had improved a lot on my time management in the classroom. The end of class time is not rushed and when adjustments are needed because of various reasons, I am able to quickly adjust to improve my students’ learning. Both my University Supervisor and Cooperating Teacher agreed that my time management in class improved the most and has become a strong point of my teaching. Another goal that I gave myself during mid-term was to learn more about the culture of the Southern Indian people. This goal has been reached and it is great that I took this experience not only to learn how to teach but to learn about people. The traditions I found here have been different but at the same time very similar to my own traditions I find at home. I want to bring this knowledge I have with me to a future teaching job by telling stories to my students either during a specific lesson or in everyday classes.

            As I mentioned at the beginning of this paper, I know that there is plenty of room for me to improve on my teaching. A few general things I can improve on are behavioral management and promoting critical and creative thinking. I saw much improvement over the semester in these areas of teaching in my small standard class and in my advanced math class. In the larger standard class does where I saw that I need improvement specifically know how to encourage students to use different problem solving strategies and help students summarize and develop generalizations. These teaching techniques are important in the subject of mathematics to develop a deeper knowledge of the subject.

            After giving myself some time to reflect on my student teaching experience abroad, I see how much I have learned and how all of the knowledge I’ve gained is applicable in the future. I look forward to having my own classroom and feeling completely comfortable in implementing the strategies learned over the years. I feel competent in teaching a diverse student body and can’t wait to meet my students and colleagues next school year and share with them my experiences.

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