Clinical Reflections This is the story of my clinical experience at Mother McAuley High School, an all girls Catholic school on the Southwest side of Chicago.

This experience at Mother McAuley was special to me in many ways. First, this was my first teaching experience. Second, McAuley is the high school I attended. Being familiar with my surroundings made me less nervous, but I still was not sure what exactly I wanted to teach. As you can see from reading my personal section, I am very comfortable working with technology on my own. I enjoy spending time at the computer teaching myself new skills. Technology is my strength, but I had no experience teaching at the high school level, or planning lessons. Sr. Nancy, my mentor teacher, and I worked for almost two months planning the lessons I taught at the end of March and the beginning of April. Sr. Nancy and I also spent a lot of time talking about teaching and the problems I was worried about, like discipline. I feel that this unique relationship gave me insights and advice into teaching that was beneficial in this first clinical experience.

After we met at the first technology workshop, Sr. Nancy and I talked about making a Power Point presentation to the students. I worried about method because I always found the lecture format dull. Also, unlike the blackboard, a Power Point presentation must be prepared ahead of time, so there is no opportunity to alter the lesson if it isn't going as planned.

We agreed that I should help the students organize and write their Macbeth papers. I observed the young women in Sr. Nancy's senior English class for one week. They are average academic level students, and observing them helped me realize that I could not assume that they would know the things I took for granted. Sr. Nancy suggested that I walk them through the steps to completing the paper. My first lesson plan involved students thinking of themes from the play and connecting the themes to characters and events in the text. When I demonstrated my plan to my teaching of writing class, my professor pointed out that this lesson plan was very "teacher centered." My classmates had helpful suggestions for altering my lesson to make it more "student centered." I decided then that the students should be divided into groups, with each group searching for themes in a particular act of the play. This, in turn, was supposed to allow students to construct thesis statements and write their papers on a particular theme.

At this time I was working on a critical paper for one of my classes. The professor suggested that we begin our research with a "critical question," which would lead to examination of a topic that interested us. I realized that when I pre-write and begin thinking about a paper, I do not search for themes by chapter. I think of questions about the text and try to formulate an answer from the given evidence.

At this point, I began to feel very frustrated with my lesson. I felt that looking for themes was a very inauthentic method of writing a paper, but I also knew that without guidance these students would do poorly or cheat. I searched the Internet for lesson plans, but I was unable to find any that I thought were any more authentic than the one I had thought of myself. Finally, I went and spoke to one of my classmates, Jenni. Jenni is a seventh grade teacher and graduate student, and she was happy to help me. She listened to my problem and suggested that I ask the students to think of critical questions of their own as a starting point to their papers. I loved this idea, and I was very enthusiastic about teaching this lesson. Sr. Nancy and I agreed that we should think of the critical questions and divide the girls up into groups to answer them. The papers were written in groups, and the girls posted them to our WCB site.

Overall, I think the lessons went well. There was only one that did not go according to plan, and that was because of technology problems that could not be anticipated. In the future, I would like have the students think of their own questions to see how that works. Perhaps, in a school like McAuley, this lesson would work better for students in higher academic tracks. I like the idea of students engaging with literature and asking their own questions. I have heard on the listserv that literature circles often work well for this. I would also like to have students writing every day in a response journal. This would give students necessary writing and critical thinking practice if it were used on a daily basis.

I don't think the technology helped in this situation. The students saw it as unnecessary and it was challenging to teach them in our limited lab time. In my future clinical experiences I will know to check on the technology resources in planning my lessons, to avoid a failure like lesson four.

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