Final Reflection

I feel as though I am reflecting on the reflections on which I have already reflected, but here goes another reflection. If that sentence is confusing to you, it's meant to be because we have written a great deal too many reflections in both the Practicum and Teaching Writing and Composition Class. Though I see the good in reflecting upon what one has learned, if it is done too often, the reflector can begin to sound a bit repetitive. Not that I'm complaining, but constantly reflecting about oneself can get quite tiresome. For the future classes, I think the reflections should be cut down or re-considered into maybe a different form such as oral reflection in class. I believe that the reflector can gain a more positive experience from reflecting upon what one has learned with his or her peers.

Now onto a different aspect of Teaching Writing and Composition Class. Overall, this class has provided me with a plethora of teaching ideas that can be tweaked to fit almost any writing lesson I create in the future! This will definitely help me out a great deal! In addition, I enjoyed the Writing Workshop because it inspired and forced me to work on a writing of which I have been wanting to start for a long time: My Firenze piece. I also feel that the Writing Workshop would be an effective tool to use in the classroom because it gives each student the opportunity to showcase their piece and fix it according to their classmates' suggestions. Students can actually learn a great deal from their classmates because I know that I have this semester! In addition to the Writing Workshop, I thoroughly enjoyed that we created writing wikis. This will be an effective tool in the future as well.

One problem I had with the class besides the amount of reflections was the two-week unit. I felt so completely unprepared to write and teach this unit. I feel as though we need to be taught how to write and create units before we actually created one on our own. Maybe during the junior and sophormore year the INLA students can create mini-units and lessons to work up toward creating the dreaded two-week unit. It just was a really stressful process, and I honestly did not know where to start. Luckily I had a great cooperating teacher that helped me with it all, or else I probably would have crashed and burned! In addition, I feel it would assist the future INLA students to have some experience teaching, maybe only even a one day lesson to high school students. Throwing us out into the classroom and expecting us to teach a two-week unit for the first time in our lives was extremely stressful. I felt like I was being thrown into the water with weights on my feet (my other content classes) and with no floaties (previous experience) and expected by my superiors to swim. It was really tough. I just feel that the amount of stress can be lessened for future INLA students by giving them the chance to experience teaching high school students earlier in their college experience. Overall, though, my experience in Teaching Writing and Composition Class has turned out positive, and I feel that I have truly learned how to think like and become an Integrated Language Arts teacher.