[Critical Practicum Reflection] CPR1 SS350 (Made 2024 Fall Semester)

Elliot Maxwell Sibert-Sweeney

09/20/2024

CPR Entry #1

My mentor teacher, Mr. Earle has a pretty strong community built in his classroom. He is a laid back teacher whose class is rather simple and focuses on projects rather than tests, which means he naturally has a decent rapport with his students. Further, he is aware of their personalities and the sorts of things they enjoy, such as one girl’s obsession with Shrek, and he regularly jokes with them during class, of course not doing so when it would be disruptive. He rarely chastises his students and frequently I feel like I would be out of place to do so either even when students are doing things that I believe should be curtailed for the sake of their education. I feel like his students like him and he certainly can communicate well with them and get them engaged, but I also feel like his teaching falls short because of his relationship with them. There is a group of 3 boys in the back left corner of the room who are always talking to each other and messing around when they should be focused, leading to, usually, at least 2 of them not following along properly during class. They toss things between each other as well, which can distract the other students, but Mr. Earle doesn’t really care about this, he just allows it instead of interrupting it. If I were in his position I would immediately move the three to separate parts of the classroom to keep this from happening and curtail any attempts to mess with each other across the room as soon as I see them. It might hurt the sense of community some, but it would ensure that the students are able to focus on class.

For warm up activities, Mr. Earle enjoys simple ones where he asks about a certain topic or group or word and elicits responses from his students about what they know in regards to them. This is simple but it allows Mr. Earle scaffolding to build his lesson plan off of and gives him a chance to understand the beliefs of his students while also getting them engaged with the lesson before it even begins. I would generally prefer more thought provoking kinds of warm up activities or more creative ones, but I cannot argue that these are not useful and effective.

There is no curriculum or pacing guide for Mr. Earle’s class. He roughly knows where he needs to be and what he’s doing for the next class or two, but when it comes to what he will likely be doing in a month or two, he has no idea. He largely seems to wing it when it comes to teaching and while he does have an ideology for how to begin units I have no idea how he ends them and if he even knows ahead of time how he wants to begin them. It seems like he just creates lesson plans as he needs them instead of having them prepared well before they are needed, and as a practicum student this is utterly infuriating. Not knowing what is coming next is confusing and it makes it difficult for me to prepare. He recently skipped ahead 50 years because he was behind the other social studies teachers and I fear that there might be ramifications for this and think that had he prepared ahead of time he could have avoided this.

I have not assisted and worked with individual and/or small groups of students. His class is so student led and focused on simple assignments and lecture that there is no place for myself or the other practicum students to get involved aside from passing out papers, occasionally, or walking around the room and making sure everyone is staying on track. We haven’t had any chances to utilize our knowledge or to work with the students in any meaningful way. Our interactions have largely been sparse and short and we spend most of our time just walking around and not doing anything while looking for something to do. It is infuriating and makes me feel useless. I hear people talk about the things they are doing in other classes and I feel as though I am missing out. I feel like I learned more from talking with Mr. Ruiz during second period than I have in Mr. Earle’s classroom since he at least talked about how the math curriculum judges progress and his own history as a teacher including teaching in Alaska, which I found really interesting. The idea of repeatedly testing students on content area knowledge and only moving on once they have shown repeatedly that they understand is an under utilized and clever idea that helps ensure that students are not just learning temporarily but permanently. I wish I could have learned of such an interesting thing from Mr. Earle, but I feel as though I have learned nothing from him other than how to improvise, something that I ideally don’t want to be doing as a teacher in the first place, at least when it comes to lesson planning. I enjoy structure and consistency and Mr. Earle’s classroom really only provides one of those and even that isn’t a guarantee.