Job Shadowing Reflection

I was lucky enough to go spend my job shadowing experience with my old fourth grade teacher, Mr. Quigley, which was a cool experience to see how things has changed in his classroom over the years and how some things and ideas are the same throughout his classroom. He also introduced me to other grade level teachers and encouraged me to spend time with them too. I got a lot of hands on experience and thought it was very helpful that I had the chance to spend time in different classrooms of different grade levels. I spent the whole first day I was at the elementary school floating between a 3rd/4th grade classroom and a 3rd grade classroom. I have never been in a mixed grade class before, so I was excited to see how that worked and flowed.
Mr. Quigley talked to me a lot about always checking in with the students and have them do a lot of self-assessments. I learned that this is a helpful idea because is it’s good to know if the student feels comfortable with the material. If the material is too easy then the student can become bored, which can result in behavioral problems and obviously the student won’t be able to expand their learning. If the material is to hard then the student can feel discouraged which could result in the same consequences as if the material was too easy. One strategy that I liked that Mr. Quigley did to implement this idea of self-reflection was he had a stop light hung up in the front of the class, after he explained the activity and went over with the students what kind of tools and knowledge the kids would need to know in order to complete the activity. He had a stop light in the front of the class with changeable quote about each activity next to each color of light in the stop light. He would have each student and himself put a sticky note with their name on it next to the color of light they felt about the activity. He then paired