You will be a student teacher sometime soon. The first day you meet your cooperating teacher, you notice that the desks are in straight rows, the room is silent most of the time, and students are hard at work independently.

On your second visit, you spend more time in the classroom and you observe the teacher's style of teaching. You notice the teacher is telling students the information, rather than providing boundaries for the students to develop the information for themselves. Every subject/class operates pretty much the same. The teacher talks, then the students work independently.

During your third visit, students are working hard at completing the worksheets passed out in the beginning of class. The students are struggling with the vocabulary, so they raise their hand for the teacher to answer their question.

You continue to make visits 2 times a week through the first semester. In all of your visits, you continued to see basically the same thing taking place. There were very few interactions outside of teacher to student and you didn't see any technology used in the classroom.

What are you going to do when you begin the official student teaching? Write your response to this question in your blog.

When I begin student teaching, I would first politely ask the teacher if he or she would mind if I change some things in the classroom. If she says yes, I would change the formation of the desks and put them into pairs so that the students would have a partner when they work. Like this, they will have someone that can ask for help in case in they don't understand a concept or I'm busy with another student. When it comes time to actually standing up in front of the class and teaching a lesson, I would do my best to not simply stand in front of the class and lecture. From personal experience, I find that method of teaching to be extremely boring and furthermore it really only benefits those students who are auditory learners. I would try to incorporate activties for visual learners as well as activities for the students who learn best by doing things. As for incorporating technology into the classroom, I would develop webquests and scavenger hunts for them to complete in the school library either during class or after school. In doing this, they will learn which sources are reputable for research as well as how to pick out the information that is really important in a article. When it comes time to asses students, I personally would stay away from worksheets because they usually don't incoporate higher level thinking skills. Most of time the worksheets are fill in the blank and students don't analyze or synthesize the different concepts that they learned. Instead of having them fill out a worksheet, I would give them an activity that incorporates the different higher level thinking skills. I would also make myself very available to help the students during the assessment if they were having difficulities with either the directions or the actual assignment.