Reflection

    Looking back at my reflections, I struggled, for a long time, with the same problem: I am not an authority figure in the minds of my students. Hence, when I try to teach the students, they may not be paying attention. Through learning the different engagements that students may engage in a classroom, I recognize the importance of behavioral and cognitive engagement of the students, which are not present in my classroom (Parsons, 2014). In fact, at an earlier class in the semester, the students were turning around to talk and play with each other, and the last two rows of the class are not listening to me. Having received suggestions from my professor at Vanderbilt and my mentor teacher, I searched for attention-getters and tried to implement these attention-getters in class. While the students are excited to learn new and fun attention-getters, the attention-getters did not put the students’ focus on my lesson. Instead, the students are excited and wanted to do the attention-getter again. Gradually, I start to realize that I’ve been so focused on knowing my content and trying to get through my task of the day that I’ve not established myself as a teacher, and the students can feel that I’m not confident. Consequently, I began to try and make sure the students are paying attention to my content, sometimes even having to do ten attention-getters within an hour of teaching. As I teach more, I also began to gain more confidence, and, by the end of the semester, the students seem to be more behaviorally and cognitively engaged than before. Conclusively, through my experiences in teaching, I have realized the importance of gaining authority in the classroom and am working on being an authority figure in my classroom by reflecting on my teaching each day.