Mitchell Tandy

Thompson Valley High School Final Reflection

The opportunity to teach, assist, and observe at Thompson Valley High School
has been an invaluable experience. I feel confident that I have both developed as
an educator and given back to the TVHS community, and that is truly a great feeling
to have. There were certainly a number of challenges, but it was in these areas that
I gained the most from my experience. While at Thompson Valley High School, I
developed a deeper understanding of my teaching style, my instructional
methodology, my lesson planning/delivery practices, my style of differentiation, and
my beliefs about education as a whole.
My teaching style is one of openness, encouragement, and flexibility, and
there are potential weaknesses associated with these qualities that I know I will
need to conscientiously address. As an educator, I pursue openness to my
students opinions, feelings, and beliefs to somewhat of an extreme. I personally
strive to fully listen to students objections, pleas for exception, complaints, and
opinions, and with these statements in mind, I actively try to seek mutually
beneficial compromise and fairness. I am reluctant to simply use my authority as
the teacher to ensure compliance. However, this openness can lead to a loss of
control of the classroom (due to a wishy-washy attitude), so I understand that the
ability to utilize my authority is vital in maintaining control of the classroom. As a
result, practicing the effective use of this ability is one of my goals going into
student teaching. Regarding my pursuit of encouragement of student effort, it is
certainly important to build student confidence (especially in math), but it is also
important to make sure errors are identified and corrected to avoid fundamental
misunderstandings of material. There is a delicate balance of reinforcement and
correction that is different for each student, and I need to be very aware of that
balance throughout my teaching. Finally, I pursue adaptability and flexibility,
although students just say that Im chill. The positive side of this is that students
are more open to receiving assistance and asking questions, since I am far from
intimidating, but it is of absolute importance to draw the line at anything that
affects the learning environment for any student. I need to utilize clear and
consistent expectations for the classroom so that this flexibility does not lead to
classroom management concerns.
My choices of preferred instructional methodology tend to align with
constructivist pedagogy, such as teaching for understanding and student-centered
learning, with some added structure. I prefer the use of explorative activities (such
as manipulating interactive-graphs or concrete representations) that aim for
conceptual understanding more than algorithm instruction that aims for rote skill
mastery. It is certainly important to teach students rote mathematical skills, but if
students understand what they are actually doing, those rote skills are very
intuitive. In addition, I have found that I greatly value students writing out their
thought processes, so I will include written responses in as many assessments
(formative and summative) as possible. These answers show more of students

thought processes than numerical problems do. Beyond these general tendencies
however, my classroom experiences showed me the value of several other practices
that I will be using in the future. Oftentimes, students struggled with concepts
covered earlier in class, but when I asked them to show me their notes on the topic,
they responded with either several minutes of digging through papers or, worse, a
blank expression. To ensure that students have notes that they can use, I will be
modifying my mentoring teachers strategy of class-wide guided notes. In addition
to ensuring students have the most important ideas written down for personal
reference, I will make sure students have their notes in a dedicated section of their
binder for easy access. If I am helping a student and ask them, What is standard
form for a line, it should take less than 30 seconds for them to find it in their notes
and show me. Finally, my classroom experience has taught me how much I value
taking time to review prior knowledge before introducing new content. Students
oftentimes do not know what they should know by now.
I have found several patterns with my lesson planning and delivery
tendencies. When planning, my preference is to over-plan the lesson so that I have
a solid idea of what I want to happen and when, and then I can deviate from the
plan as necessary. The value of the plan itself is to act as a kind of foundation to
build from, rather than a strict schedule to follow. When constructing the plan, I
tend to be very goal-oriented and focused, with a backwards-by-design mentality.
Every step of the lesson exists purely to move towards achieving the goal of the
lesson; the only tangents I know are lines relative to curves and trigonometric
functions! In the lesson plan, when possible, I try to limit lecture and instruction in
favor of more time spent on student exploration and activities, but the balance
between the two depends on the concept in question. The elimination method for
solving systems of equations, for example, requires much more direct instruction
than finding the area of geometric figures. In the lessons delivery, I have found
that I prefer writing directions on the board and then speaking them, rather than
just speaking them, simply because it makes them easier for students to reference
later if clarification is needed.
My approach to differentiation for the unique learners in my classroom is
focused on ability levels and learning styles. Regarding ability levels, I have found
that it is unrealistic to expect the same product from vastly different students, so
adjusting assessments and activities for students to succeed is an important
practice that I try to keep in mind. One example was when I allowed a student to
take pictures of posted questions so that he could complete them all at his desk.
The reason I allowed this was that the student had a history of low motivation in
class, so for him to complete problems in a way that worked for him was a
significant improvement. I will need to be mindful of minor accommodations that I
can provide for students in my lessons. An issue that I need to be aware of
regarding ability levels is that I naturally tend to focus my attention on struggling
students more than overachieving students. To account for this tendency, I need to
deliberately plan ways to address students who are faster than the rest of the class,
which can be as simple as extra-credit math puzzles or handing out homework so
that they can get a head start if they finish activities before their peers. However,
these are short-term solutions to a long-term issue, and I will need to develop more

effective accommodations for these advanced students. On a different note, my

belief on learning styles is that it is equally important for me to design lessons and
activities to address different kinds of learners as it is for me to support student
growth by making students learn in ways that they may not be as competent in.
Students who work well alone should be allowed to do so, but they also need to
learn the invaluable skills of cooperation and collaboration. Students who are visual
learners should be presented with diagrams, graphs, and other visual
representations, but they also need to learn how to analyze information through
lecture or manipulatives.
Overall, I finally came to understand something about myself that I had
suspected before the semester began. I am at my best working with struggling
students rather than students who consistently exceed expectations. My calling is
not with calculus students or statistics students, but with the average students
who are struggling to make it through algebra 1, geometry, and algebra 2. With
these students, I am not frustrated when they should know this by now, because
in these situations, I am excited to actually make a difference in that students life.
A moment that happened today will stick with me forever. At the beginning of
the semester, I walked into my assigned classroom to find a student sitting in the
back corner. He was half-asleep, unmotivated and just uninterested in anything
going on in class. Over the semester, I consistently checked in with him on
questions, helped him when he missed the days of class, and generally built a good
professional relationship with him. Today, I had just finished working with him on a
question, and as I stood up to move on, he energetically asked me to hold on a
second. For the first time this entire semester, he wanted to have me check off a
homework assignment that he finished on time. In that moment, I knew that I had
really made a difference.