For my internship 1 I was placed at Relife School in Puyallup. Relife is part of the
Puget Sound Educational Service District. Relife is a K-12 school serving students with
significant behavioral challenges. Currently Relife has around 40 students and about 20
staff members. I began working at Relife at the beginning of the school year as a BESS
(Behavioral and Education Support Specialist). At the start of my internship I was asked
to get my emergency certification and become the teacher in a new classroom. So at the
beginning of February I became the teacher for a 5th/6th grade classroom with 4 students.
The students are grouped by grade age level for their homeroom and social skills
classes but move around for academics based on their levels. So for academics such as
Math, Reading, and Science I was still able to work with my mentor teacher and co-teach
those subjects. At the start of the quarter my mentor teacher handled most of the lesson
planning and I worked more as a support staff. As the quarter went on we began taking
turns with lesson planning and facilitating lessons and by the end of the quarter I was
planning/facilitating the majority of the lessons as my mentor teacher prepared to go on
extended leave for medical reasons.
Becoming the lead teacher in my own classroom was certainly a challenging
experience but also very rewarding. The first obstacle or challenge I had was how to
organize my classroom effectively. The classroom I was given had previously been used
as an art room and also for a shop class. So a good chunk of my time the Friday before I
opened my new classroom was spent cleaning out the room and getting things put in/out
of storage. It was an interesting experience to think of how I wanted desks/chairs/tables
to be set up and to think about how the physical layout of classroom can influence the
culture of the class. Once I got the physical aspects of the classroom the way I wanted
them my next project was deciding on how I wanted to decorate my walls. I decided that
this would be a good task to have my students contribute their ideas for to help give them
ownership of their new classroom. We spent our social skills periods for the first week
designing posters for our classroom rules and expectations as well as each student created
their own poster identifying characteristics that they wanted people to know about them.
The students also helped pick out posters that we were able to order online to decorate
our classroom with. The students enjoyed helping set up the classroom and it help give
them a sense of ownership of the new classroom.
Relife is a K-12 school but it is divided into two wings. The east wing has the
elementary aged kids and the west wing has the middle/high school aged kids. The reason
I was asked to open a new classroom was that there were several students who did not
quite fit in with the other elementary aged students but were not quite ready to move to
the middle school classroom on the west end. So my new classroom was opened to be a
transitional classroom from the elementary classrooms to the middle school classrooms.
The four students I had joining my classroom were not initially excited to be moving to a
new classroom halfway through the year. Three of my students wanted to stay in their
current classroom as it was what they were familiar with. The fourth student wanted to
change classrooms but was upset that she was not moving up to the middle school
classroom. My new classroom has been in place for about a month and a half and I am
still working on the students becoming familiar with the class and making it their own. I
have been trying to establish classroom expectations and create the culture I want for my
classroom. Having the students help with the decoration of the class and working together
to create classroom expectations has helped get the students to buy in to the new
classroom.
With my new class this quarter I have been working hard on improving my
classroom management skills and managing students behaviors. As a BESS this was the
main part of my job the only difference is now I am the lead person for my classroom and
am in charge of setting those class expectations and developing our classroom culture. In
taking on my new role I also was given students that I had not worked with before as I
moved from the 11th/12th grade classroom down to the elementary wing. So for the first
several weeks I focused on building rapport with my new students and also setting
consistent expectations and routines for the classroom. As my previous focus was on
behavior these aspect of my new role came fairly naturally. The part that required a vast
amount of new learning for me was organizing and planning lessons.
As a BESS I had practice helping students with academics in small group settings
and in individual instruction. This practice tended to be more on the side of tutoring
rather than teaching. This quarter as part of the internship and also just in my new role as
a teacher for Relife I had to move a little away from the small group tutoring and begin
teaching lessons to small groups. I was given opportunities to plan and facilitate lessons
for math and reading. I am also a co-teacher for a science class but the other co-teacher
handles the lesson planning and I am there for instructional and behavioral support. At
Relife since we are working with students with behavioral needs the focus sometimes has
to be on behavior management instead of academics. To this end it is also difficult to
predict which students will be on task on different days and actually make it to their
academic lessons. This causes problems with lesson planning as it can be difficult to have
continuous lessons or units when students only make it to class some days of the week
and not others. I worked on developing lessons that could be adapted to different students
based on where they were academically and also did not necessarily rely on them being
present and on task everyday. For example for reading lessons instead of continually
working on a novel selection for lesson plans I selected short passages and activities to go
along with those passages that could be completed in a single class period.
Overall this internship experience while still at my current place of employment
coincided with a change in positions for me and gave me new opportunities to grow as an
educator. In particular I enjoyed the fact that I got to work with different co-teachers for
different subjects and was exposed to a variety of teaching styles. I look forward to
continuing to get opportunities to expand my skill set as a teacher and in particular
continue to grow in my classroom management and organizational skills.