October Reflection

During the month of October, I have learned/noticed that some of my students are beginning to lose focus; therefore, they are not attending class and completing assignments as they were in the beginning of the semester.  This has affected these students’ grades for which I am attempting to reach in order to get them back on track to pass the semester.  Unfortunately, if they are not attending class or submitting assignments, they are unable to take advantage of the time allowed in class to complete/begin assignments.  I have also learned that it is difficult to allow time for a lot of assignments while still allowing instructional time to cover particular material.  It is difficult to allow time to complete lengthier assessments, as I am aware that some of the students are not taking advantage of this time and using it wisely.  I do not want those students sitting there doing nothing with this valuable class time. 

The discoveries that I uncovered during the month of October is that I did not allow as much class time to complete assignments.  However, the unit in October was set up differently.  During the first month of school, we focused on fictional short stories for which a comprehension quiz was assigned after each story.  During October, we read and analyzed nonfiction for which we take one test at the end of the unit.  The midterm was situated in the middle of my unit, so I created a midterm using our nonfiction introductory material.  Unfortunately, I did not allow time for this in class due to the length of the midterm.  However, I did allow some class time for students to complete/begin nonfiction activities that accompanied this unit.  

Again, the challenges I faced this month was time.  I wanted to allow more in-class time for students to complete assignments; however, this became difficult with the material we were covering.  Also, along with the challenge of time, my unit was set up differently, but I did allow time to complete activities instead of quizzes since this unit concludes with a unit test.  I will allow the students’ class time to complete this Nonfiction Unit Test, so that I can continue to analyze if this time is beneficial to the students.

I believe I will address my time issue by reflecting on the amount of material I want to cover versus the amount of time I want to allow my students to complete in-class assignments.  I will also continue to plan the rest of the semester in order to gauge how much time I have left and what material I would like to cover with the semester remaining.  This will allow me to plan my class time accordingly so that my students will be able to take advantage of in-class time for assignments while still allowing enough instructional time to cover the most important aspects of the course.

September Reflection

During the month of September, I learned that so many other "wonderings" can stem from the initial "wondering!" My initial wondering is "Will having students in the General English 2 class complete assignments in class increase grades, participation, and attendance?"  It is amazing how you really start looking down different avenues as you research just one aspect of your class.  I also learned that you have to accommodate for various circumstances, such as absences, tardiness, early outs, access issues, and new enrollments.

So far, I have allowed my students to complete six quizzes in class.  The first one was only available in class.  I decided it would be beneficial to leave the others open until the original due dates of the following Sunday by midnight.  This helped a lot with the various circumstances mentioned above.  Even if students had completed these quizzes prior to class, it freed up time for them to complete other assignments.  Although I still enter zeroes into my gradebook, the number of zeroes entered have decreased for the quizzes that the students had time to complete in class.  There was one quiz in particular for which I allowed class time to complete that resulted in a few more zeroes that the others, but I am thinking it is because it was a difficult story or maybe I should have allotted more class time; I am hoping it is not that I am just losing some of my students at this point in time.  During these class times, it is nice to see the activity going on through the Blackboard gradebook.  Also, the students participation and attendance have been great! 

One of the challenges that I face is time.  It seems as though with the other lessons/activities/discussions/questions that I want to cover in class, I am cutting their in-class quiz time a little shorter than I want.  Also, I still have students who do not take advantage of this time.  To overcome these challenges, I still remind the students of their assignments every day in class, as well as send reminder emails every Friday about assignments that are due by midnight Sunday.

I believe to address the time issue stated above, I will use better time management so that I can allow more time for certain in-class assignments/quizzes.  I will have to determine which deserves more time/concentration/attention and achieve a good balance of each and plan accordingly.  :)