Ariel’s Pedagogy Story

Lectures:

The lecture that most inspired me was the lecture of Laura Major in the ETAI conference. She spoke about SEL learning which stands for social and emotional learning. Laura discussed how one can incorporate SEL into our curriculum by reading; short stories, novel, essays, etc, and have an open discussion with their students about certain social problems and emotional topics. This year in students teaching, I personally couldn’t apply SEL to my curriculum due to the fact that they were still too young to read and therefore we didn’t have emotional conversations.This lecture was important to me because I felt that as a teacher, it is important to understand what your students feel and try to connect with them on a more personal level. Another lecture that I found very useful was the lecture that Jennifer gave on how to build a lesson plan. Every week we would have to write a lesson plan in order to teach in our school. We wrote dozens of lesson plans whether it was for teaching letters, vocabulary, reading, writing and even listening. There were many lectures that were given to us about all of the things that we need to know for teaching and it was truly inspiring.

Practical Training in School:

Each week on Wednesday we would go to our cooperating schools and would apply everything that we learned throughout the year into full action. This year I taught third grade. They were the most amazing group of students I have ever had. I taught them letters and vocabulary, how to read words and sentences, how to associate certain words with the letters that they learned, and many many more. Throughout the year I learned so much from my cooperating teacher Lior. I learned how to be patient, how to discipline, how to have fun while teaching, and most importantly how to be the best teacher I could be. We had English day which is where we created many games that include English such as a word search, throwing the ball with the vocabulary word into the correct bin, making bracelets with ABC beads, and throwing the ball into certain holes and then reading the word out loud. That was by far my favorite day! Watching the students that I taught grow and flourish throughout the year made me so proud and gave me the feeling that I actually made a difference. I will truly miss my third grade class.

What I would like to learn for next year:

I do in fact feel like I have learned a lot about what being a teacher includes, but I do feel like I have a lot more to learn. This year we were taught how to teach reading, writing, listening and speaking as well as other things, but I feel that I could’ve been taught more about those topics. The way that these subjects were taught were more for Elementary school rather than middle and high school. I personally do not feel prepared for next year when it comes to teaching these subjects. I would also like to learn how to deal with personal problems that the students come to me with as well as how to deal with parents. I believe that everything that I need to know will be learned through experience and I will be the best teacher that I can.