Reflection 7

It is official, the school was shut down this week. My master teacher and I were hoping

that we would be able to stay in school for another week since this week was the last week for

the unit of ecology. We had planned a few HHMI activities and an ecological relationships

activity. This activity was going to go off of what I know the students like, pictures of different

animals. Knowing students love looking at animals and making prediction, this activity was

going to help them see real life examples of different kinds of species interactions past predator

and prey interactions. I had to find a way to give this activity for the students, since I did not

want to give the students typical notes, worksheet, and video type activities to learn ecology.

I ended up scanning the whole activity for the students to work on. Sadly, with this

change in learning I have noticed a lot of students struggling. I have found that I need to write

directions over and over again, and expect a lot of edits to these directions. The initial directions

that I post was not always the best first set of directions. I had found that I need to give students

time to ask questions, and based on those questions I knew were to needed to clarify my

directions. This also helped me for the future directions I gave because I could start to figure out

where students might get confused.

I have found that this experience so far has taught me to predict how my students are

feeling and might react to certain assignments, and how to help and support their efforts in this

new class format. I have to keep reminding myself that the students have 6 classes in a day and

these classes all have work for the students to do to replace a class period of work. This can get

the students quite busy and have little down time. This is a stressful time due to COVID 19 and

the students need time to process the new life they are going to be living for the next few weeks

and get settled into online classes.

 Since this week was busy with work from my class, my goal for the next week is to give

students extra time to work on their project. This will allow them to catch up with any late work

and get used to working online in their other classes. With this new method teaching, jamming in

too much in one week might harm the students more than help them. so taking a step back and

giving students extra time will be better than too much online work for the students.