[Professional Growth Notes] PGN 10/5 (Made 2025 Fall Semester)

This week I mostly found myself doing very little during my first period at Northside, and this is likely how it will continue to be since that class is, firstly, not my specialty (PLTW not history or sociology), and, secondly, because Mr. Harter, the teacher, has a very loose style of classroom where he largely has his kids working on things independently and simply helps them out as they need help. There’s basically no chance for me to do anything in that class and even he doesn’t do too much because his students are so self-sufficient. Given that it’s a quarter semester class, however, I have hope that early into semester 2, when I go back, I’ll be able to participate more since the students won’t be working on big projects right away (I hope). In my second period at Northside I also found myself not doing much, but that was because this entire week my fellow immersive learning students (though ones who are supposed to be at Northside) were doing their own lessons. I was, thankfully, able to go around the room and help students out here and there, and I was able to give my fellow immersive learning students some tips and help guide them a bit. Something I noticed is that the first time I was helping out and answering kids’ questions, I was largely the only one doing that aside from the leader of the lesson, and even he wasn’t doing it much, but later on everyone was doing it aside from Mr. Young, which made sense because we’re the ones learning to teach and who will get the most value from it. Not being the only one helping, though, left me actually with very little assistance to give, and I found myself with a lot of free time. It really sucks to be in a class with 3 other immersive learning students and a teacher, because there’s just not enough for everyone to do, but at least I got to do a very small amount of teaching (reading some questions to the students) on Friday, but I wouldn’t call that a lesson implementation, so much as a couple minutes of talking to the students. Still, I’m just thankful to have been in the classroom and to have been able to see so many teaching strategies and to get a further taste of what it is to be a teacher.