As an accomodation to my reticent students I use a lot of forms for bellringers and summaries, and Desmos activities for lessons where students can answer in a text box. I can ask all the right questions, but I need to find a way to encourage answers. Even though I routinely score reasonably well in those columns, I know they are areas of growth for me. Questioning and Student Engagment are two of the domains in our evaluation rubric. So many are reluctant even to this day to answer out loud. Even three years on, the habits of solitude that students built during pandemic-era remote teaching and learning are hard to undo. There’s days even now I still feel lke I’m teaching to an empty room. Of course there would be no answer, and that wait (pretend) time seemed like an eternity. When I wanted to ask a question, I’d have to pull a stick, look at the seat where that student sat, and ask the question out loud. The part of that exercise I remember most vividly is we used popsicle sticks for cold-calling students. Just like if I had kids there – wait time after questions, managing transitions, the whole schmeer. He’d meet with me after school, go over my formal lesson plan, then have me teach the lesson to an empty room. The other was a 21st-century guy who firmly believed a brand-new teacher could benefit greatly from practice reps. He knew that for a brand-new teacher planning intentionally was critical – I wouldn’t know enough to wing it if things went sideways. He’d have me plan out my lessons in outline form in a spiral notebook, down to which problems from the text I woud use as in-class examples. One was very old-school, kept a paper gradebook, wore a shirt and tie to teach in. My student teaching semester was a valuable experience thanks to two outstanding mentor teachers.
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