Forever a First Year Teacher

  What went well: Gots and Needs! On the first day at the end of each class I pushed out a link to a Google Form with two Qs: What is one thing you got from today's meeting? What is one thing you think we'll need to work on? Then I chose some responses and stuck them in a slide and made that the first slide for the next day. This allowed the kids to see that not only was I going to ask them for feedback frequently, but also that I was listening to it! 😄 What needs work: I need to remember to build in talk time for them early in a lesson. I did this in one class but not the other and the difference was clear. They seemed to disengage after like 10 min and it was hard to get them back after that. So I need to remember: they'll need interaction opportunities early and often! General Notes: Tried the "here's the objective, now go and do it" structure in EDD (seniors) and it worked pretty well. Students were still able to rejoin the meeting if they needed me.  ...

 What went well: I used this slide deck  for the session. Everyone had edit rights to it so they could move things around in certain slides. We stuck to a good pace . So many of the sessions I've been in have gone over and I wanted to make sure we ended at the right time. This is going to be extremely important for our kids. If I end a class session right when our time is up, they only have a ten minute break before the next class starts. I can't take any of that, ever! It already may be not enough, but we'll feel it out and listen to feedback from kids. Using the term "Reminders" instead of "Norms". Norms always felt kinda "off" to me, stuffy, boring. Reminders is more like a heads up. And I liked having the first reminder be "Help each other" and the last one "There'll be time." I'd like to have some version of "Don't Panic!" in my reminders every class.   We used breakout rooms. For installing th...