Overall Reflection

I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of being in my clinical placement. I

learned so much from taking my observational field notes, student/teacher
interviews, and collecting classroom documents. This experience helped me
grow in numerous ways. I was thankful to have an opportunity to see
different forms of language arts instruction during my time spent in the
classroom. I was able to see the teacher instructing the kids on writing
biographies and writing various forms of poetry. I also had a chance to
observe the teacher conferencing with students as well as confer with a few
students myself on a story that was written about a fun memory with your
family. I found that the organization and flow of the classroom was very
efficient. Although writing was not a major focus every single day, the times
where writing was being done, I learned a lot from these experiences. The
teacher had great classroom management techniques, I found many posters
that students were encouraged to refer to before turning in work or asking a
question. For example, the teacher had steps that students should take to
write and there were posters that reminded students to use capital letters
and appropriate punctuation marks in their sentences. I agreed with this
process of students being accountable for checking their work before they
turn in a finished product. I also found that the students seemed to really
enjoy writing in general. Every opportunity that students had to write, they
were very excited because it was not something that they are able to do
every day. Although most of the students were eager to write and ideas
came to them easily to express in writing, I noticed the difficulty that some
students were having during a writers block moment. The way that the
teacher reacted to these struggling writers was not the best intervention for
these children. Instead of expressing frustration to these students, I think it
would have been more helpful to ask the students questions to spark their
memory or pair them with a partner to get some ideas flowing between the
two students to encourage the struggling writer to write about something
they feel confident about. One thing that really stood out to me was a miniconference that I had with a student about his haiku. The student wanted to
share his poem with me because he was extremely proud of his work. He told
me his process for writing his haiku, and told me that he decided to write
about his favorite animal. He thought about characteristics that make up an
elephant and used those traits to describe his animal in his poem. I asked the
student if he enjoyed writing, and he said yes, his favorite things to write
about are famous historical figures and most recently he described a story
that was written about Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. It thought
that it was incredible that a young student voluntarily wrote about this at
home. After hearing this from the student, I walked away from that moment
feeling sad that these students do not have many chances in school to

express themselves and write about whatever they please. Reflecting on this
experience made me realize that students really do enjoy writing and if they
are writing this much at home, why is writing not made a priority in schools?
One of my favorite memories from this experience was when the kids were
able to pick out one poem from their poetry book to share and play, guess
my poem. The student would read their favorite poem and their peers would
guess the type of poem. I recognized how excited the students were to share
their published work and have a chance to hear their classmates poems. A
huge takeaway for me in this experience was seeing in context how setting a
purpose for writing allows for better, productive work and at the end of the
day the students felt accomplished and more confident in their writing
abilities after this experience.