This week was a short one in the classroom. Wednesday and Thursday were training days for the language arts teams for middle schools around the county. Due to the low reading/comp/fluency scores of the WesTests this past year, teachers and administration have been collaborating on an intervention plan.
TCMS has purchased a program called AIMSweb to support this plan. AIMSweb measures progress of each individual student, and provides assessment and helps to analyze scores. My mentor teacher and I, along with three other eighth grade teachers spent two days at West Taylor Elementary learning how to use this program.
As I was talking to teachers from TCMS, as well as the other intern who attended the training, we began to talk about future contract hours for the Spring semester. It was suggested that, since we had been trained to use this program, we might spend a majority of our contract hours administering the program and assessing students' progress. This training was also applicable to our Professional Development requirements for this semester.
When my mentor teacher returned to TCMS after the last day of training, she was very surprised at what the substitute had left for her in regard to classwork and student behavior. The students completed very little of the work left for them, and it was clear that the substitute was not interested in classroom management. I figure we'll spend a good part of the next week trying to catch up on time lost because of the substitute; this will be a good "what NOT to do" learning experience for me!
Sometimes you learn the hard way-- through process of elimination-- who is good as a sub and who isn't. In my experience, students eventually figured out that they did more stuff they liked when I was there, so if they didn't want to have to be dealing with me picking up pieces-- which would keep them from doing the stuff they liked-- then they needed to cooperate with the sub.
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