Field Experience Reflection

Field Experience Reflection

1. How many hours did you complete?
• 5 hours 45 minutes

2. In a short paragraph or bulleted list, how did you spend your time?

• Interviewing SLMS and In-Service Classroom Teachers
• Tutoring a Middle-School Student
• PTO Meeting
• SBDM Meeting

 

3. How did the experience help you to strengthen at least one Kentucky Teacher Standard? (be sure to name the standard)
• 8.1 Identifies opportunities to engage in collaborations that enhance student learning.
With each experience, I was reminded of the benefits of collaborating with others, whether it is our school’s SLMS, the SBDM committee, with other teachers and parents working together with the PTO and working with parents and students to provide extra academic help. There are so many opportunities to enhance student learning in a variety of ways. For example, through the interview with our SLMS, I learned of different technologies that I can use in my classroom. Through participation in PTO, it was decided that we would give classrooms $100 in AR books. Through SBDM, we discussed our schools reading scores and how we can work to improve those scores. All of these provide very different, but very important ways to collaborate and enhance student learning.

4. Talk a little about one thing you learned because of this field experience.
• I think the thing that was most interesting to me was how our SLMS chooses books for the library. There are several aspects she looks at when choosing books and number one is student requests. She also uses the Follett website (which I had never heard of) which allows her to search different categories that allow her find the types of books that she may be searching for such as Newbery Honor books, high interest books, etc. In addition, she talks with (collaborates) the public librarian and asks what is popular, along with meeting with our district’s SLMS. Another aspect she considers is what other libraries in our district have purchased and what circulates well, which she is able to look at through Destiny, the check-out system our school district uses. Finally, she uses

www.lexile.com, a site that allows her to search for books according to lexile ranges.  It also lists the most popular books in those ranges. There is a lot to consider when choosing books for the library, more than I even realized, though I am not surprised. It’s hard to narrow down books to choose for use in the classroom, much less the entire school!