My art Over the last several weeks, I have really found my rhythm. Being "the teacher" has brought so many amazing experiences with it. I find that I am in a routine of what I need to do week by week, and I smoothly fall into a workflow. This has allowed my students to get into more of a rhythm as well, knowing what to expect and how to function successfully in my classroom. I have seen the fruits of my labor. For example, I have been working on my questioning with my coach, in other words, how to ask students relevant and meaningful questions about the content, and recently I have seen my questioning flourish. I must be asking the right things, because my students have begun to have meaningful conversations about art even unprompted. We talk about colors and shapes effortlessly, and students can now articulate why they made certain artistic choices within these two elements that we are focusing on. This has been working well. I want to continue working on my questioning by spending more time thinking of new questions to ask every day.
As an individual, these experiences have significant meaning for me. They make me feel like "I've got this." I think that these successes are working well for building my confidence in my teaching of the content itself. That being said, I need to keep working on my confidence in classroom management and communicating boundaries to students, which is difficult to prepare for and implement in teaching because you never know what students will do. This will get easier when I have my own classroom, as I will be able to prepare by setting these boundaries from the beginning.
Based on these experiences, I will continue my successes as a new teacher by allowing myself time at the beginning of the year to get into a rhythm, and really search for that work-flow feeling that is familiar to me now. I will build excitement in my students, which helps with this work flow, by asking relevant questions and allowing for free flowing conversations. I think that when students are really invested in the work, the work flow and rhythm we all strive for as teachers naturally follows. My art piece, a pizza I made from scratch, represents this because I am so invested in the thought of eating the pizza that I get into a work flow and I don't mind that it is a lot of work to make.