Monday, April 30, 2018
Thursday, April 19, 2018
Week of April 8th Reflection
This week is the first week back from spring break. The students are a little slow to getting back into the groove of things. I sent out a reminder for students to join in on our weekly live lesson, scheduled for every Wednesday. Unfortunately, attendance still suffered very tremendously. What suffered even more, was participation levels. At first, I was not aware of the low level of participation. Many of the students don't participate in the warm-up, so it completely went over my head that participation was so low. It wasn't until I started asking scaffolded questions from the lesson, that Ii realize I wasn't getting too many answers. So in an effort to determine exactly how many students were participating, as well as reward them, I asked the students to send me a webmail. In the webmail, they simply had to say, "I participated". Once I received their webmail, I'd rewarded them with a free 100% discussion grade. It pains me to say, only 5 students sent in that webmail.
This was a little discouraging, as I had just had a meeting with my principal about increasing my live lesson attendance numbers. I was sitting there thinking, why is no one participating?”, “am I boring them?”, “am I confusing them?”, “will my principal be upset with me?”, and “What could I possible do to increase these numbers?” I knew I couldn’t keep this from serving the students that were actually participating, so I pushed these thought to the side and finished my lessons.
Despite such low participation, the live lesson went very smoothly. I got through the objectives I set for that day, and each of the students expressed their gratitude for the day’s lesson. For next week’s live lesson, i’ll have to be sure to send out reminders a little earlier than usual. Hopefully this will catch those students that simply forget, or do not check their webmails on a daily basis. With the weather getting warmer outside, I am going to have to sit and really think about ways to get students to want to wake up at 8 am. The 2pm class seems to have much better attendance and participation.
This was a little discouraging, as I had just had a meeting with my principal about increasing my live lesson attendance numbers. I was sitting there thinking, why is no one participating?”, “am I boring them?”, “am I confusing them?”, “will my principal be upset with me?”, and “What could I possible do to increase these numbers?” I knew I couldn’t keep this from serving the students that were actually participating, so I pushed these thought to the side and finished my lessons.
Despite such low participation, the live lesson went very smoothly. I got through the objectives I set for that day, and each of the students expressed their gratitude for the day’s lesson. For next week’s live lesson, i’ll have to be sure to send out reminders a little earlier than usual. Hopefully this will catch those students that simply forget, or do not check their webmails on a daily basis. With the weather getting warmer outside, I am going to have to sit and really think about ways to get students to want to wake up at 8 am. The 2pm class seems to have much better attendance and participation.
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