High School Hours (South Division)

Friday, April 23, 2010

Today's High School Hours: 8.0 hours
Total High School Hours: 14.5 hours
Total Hours: 60.5 hours

Today I spent the day where I will be completing the majority of my secondary practicum hours. A large part of the morning was taken up by touring the library and meeting the staff. Compared to the high school library that I work in this library is massive. Sizewize the main library is almost 4 times larger than my high school's. All of the non-fiction is housed in this main section of the library. There is also a computer lab, a college interest section, and a developing writing workshop. The library also consists of a family section that holds all of the fiction books. This is about as big as a very large classroom. They have playaways, listening sections, a space to eat, couches and comfy chairs, and a very large Spanish language section. In the background there is music playing to settle the students down and encourage them to relax. This room blew my mind. It seems like its main purpose is simply to encourage students to read for fun. The library also contains a massive back room that allows for ample storage.

Next I sat in on a professional development meeting. The LMS here is working with another staff member to get teachers to start writing better research questions and projects for their students. They are trying to get teachers to learn how to write more open-ended research questions and also provide students and teachers with a framework on how to go about creating and doing the research. They were kind of working on the first steps of this and on showing teachers why it is necessary to do this. They have a half-hour presentation to try to get teachers on board and they were trying to sort out their thoughts on how to make this work in an extremely short period of time. This was something that I really didn't know that LMSs did - tyring to teach the teachers about how to write good research projects and help them in their professional development.

In the afternoon I met with an art teacher that I will be working on a project with. He has a project that he has done with students in the past and now wants to upgrade it. I will be helping him upgrade the technological parts of the presentation, as well as a template for how he would like the students to complete it, and coming up with a resource list that students can find online. The LMS has already done this project with him, so she is showing me what to expect and what will be needed. I spent some time after this making a list of the books that could be used for this and then looking for them in the library.

I observed a class that was using the WISCareers site. They were getting ready for the ACTs and learning test taking strategies for the math portion of the test.

I thought that I did more, but a lot of these things took a lot of time, and small things kept coming up that kept us running around, but had no real bearing on the day.