Exit Interview

Content:

(1) What is your essential question, and what are your answers?  What is your best answer and why?

My essential question is : How does a teacher best set a learning environment where the majority time is spent on teaching and learning rather than discipline?
My answers are:  Structure which includes lesson plans, routines, seating arrangements, and being prepared.  My second answer is expectations such as classroom rules; and my third answer is parent communication. 
My best answer is: Structure, because a teacher who takes their time in planning an effective structure spends less time disciplining their classroom and more time teaching. All of my research and experience points to structure as my best answer without structure there would be chaos in the classroom.

(2) What process did you take to arrive at this answer?
I decided structure was my best answer out of all three of my answers because of my mentorship. I was able to see how different teachers handled different situations which in the end bottled down to structure, I like how Robert J. Mackenzie and Lisa Stanzione put it "Structure it the organizational foundation in a classroom" which I completely agree with, which my experience and research proves correct.

(3) What problems did you face?  How did you resolve them?

The only problem I faced was the lack of resources to my answers. Most of the information online was extremely repetitive because once one thing works really well in the classroom it spreads like wildfire. Therefore looking for articles and resources to support my answers soon became a tedious task. I tried looking for books to do research on, but I was only able to find one book that had useful information that my mentor recommended. The other books that I found had information that would only work in a perfect world such as, if you talk to the student that is  misbehaving they won't misbehave ever misbehave again. What I did to resolve this problem was to look for articles that were parent child based not teacher child based, since parents are the students first teacher the articles that I found were actually extremely helpful.

(4) What are the two most significant sources you used to answer your essential question and why?

My best source that helped me answer my essential question was no other than my mentor, Lourdes Garay. She is an incredible mentor, that I don't even know how I could possibly thank her. She truly helped me with my whole senior project.  She helped me construct a essential question and answers, figure out why the answers we created answered my essential question, offered ideas for my Independent Components and gave me other resources I could use. For my essential question she helped me network with other teachers to see how they taught differently from her this helped me gather  valuable information that helped me answer my essential question. Which leads me to my second best source my mentor let me borrow a book called Setting Limits in a Classroom by Robert J. Mackenzie and Lisa Stanzonie. This book was very resourceful it had information for all my answers. This book was so informative and useful that I would recommend it to all teachers.  Mackenzie  and Stanzonie are remarkably well authors in the book they provide me ideas, examples that I have included to explain not only my best answer but also my other answers.