Ajanae Peterson

5/15/2023

4th 9 Weeks

Saegert Elementary /Saiz/2nd grade

2:28pm-

As I conclude my final week being a teacher's aide, I have experienced personal growth

not only as a student intern but also as a professional instructor's aide. From my first year as

teachers intern, I was nervous about my capabilities, my confidence and the strength of being

strict with kids. As I continued with the program, I learned all the ins and outs of the teaching

field within my two years. I am extremely grateful for my teachers who showed me all the great

opportunities there were within the career of teaching. I have learned that it is okay to have

setbacks with pushing lessons back to get a better understanding of the TEKS, finding a different

way to not only get the students to understand but also have the students be able to retaliate over

the subject being taught. I have seen self-growth with being able to not hold the students' hand

while they work, learning how to not get over stimulated while teaching my lesson and most

importantly not being afraid to make a mistake.

Growing as an individual came with a lot of taking criticism, with being able to hear

someone else's point of view to taking notice of how the teacher instructed, and disciplined the

classroom then later reapply it to my way of teaching. I believe in an area every educator needs

to feel confident in, is being able to take criticism well and connect it to your role, and not to

yourself. Being able to intake these things as an educator is a skill asset to possess. Something I

learned throughout my years of being a teacher's aide is that each student has their own way of
learning, students who are lower in reading are extremely talented, it just takes time to figure out

how they learn. My teacher stated, “every child can learn you just have to find out how they

learn it.”

This made me feel more inspired to be involved with teaching students, working with

them and guiding them. I started to be more attentive with helping students with reading and

recalling information, I started to read to the students so they can hear I pronounce words and see

how I pronounce them as well. I used to sit in the classroom waiting for the teacher to give me

instructions to teach the students after time I started to branch out by first asking what the

students are doing then asking if they understand it then start easing my way into assisting the

classroom. As I slowly started to feel more comfortable in the classroom after time, the last day

of field sites came closer than I expected I became more active with doing fun games with math

and reading.

Which brought me closer to the students along with my teacher something I will always

cherish is the never-ending moments of seeing the students understand not only my lessons but

the teachers lesson as well, with my small group I was able to take an opportunity of working

deeper into the student learning way by re-wording the question or asking them how would you

solve this problem. By me doing that I was able to work on me not hold the student's hand while

also seeing how the student works on their own. As my last year of being a teacher aide finalizes,

I will take all the criticism, setbacks and the never-ending moments of seeing the light bulb of

the students understanding and further apply it to my future classroom.