× Gretchen Rice Engineering Teaching Photography
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Teaching Expereince

Throughout my life I have been a teacher, in the past two years I gained official teaching experience.

COVID Pod - Hebron, Maine

In the fall of 2020 COVID was hitting hard and parents were making hard decisions about what to do about their children's schooling. Because of these decisions I had the opportunity to work with a pod of six kids. I had three first graders, a third, fourth, and fifth grader. My students all had virtual school with their teachers for a few hours in the morning. In the morning I was doing a lot of classroom management, helping students with their work, and planning for the afternoon. In the afternoon we always had time to do school work and enrichment activities I designed for them. carved large pumpkins on steps in a hallway outside our classroom We did everything from going on nature walks, to building robots, to art activities, to designing boats. I worked with the students to keep all of them interested and engaged. This was a unique environment because their parents encouraged me to expose the kids to different things and the classroom was so small. Because of this, I was really able to try new things and see what worked. It was special to have one-on-one time with each student and get to really know them. carved large pumpkins on steps in a hallway outside our classroom It allowed me to better help them with their school work and design activities that would be fun to each of them. We were also able to spend a lot of time talking about things that are important to the development of humans like kindness, gratitude, sharing, etc. We had time to stop after any incident and resolve in a productive, efficient way.

Outside of the classroom I remained very connected to the parents. I was able to keep them updated on our activities through a weekly newsletter. I was also able to involve them in many of our afternoon activities. All of the parents were close by all day so we had a lot of fun pop-ins which created and even more fun classroom experience. It was important we all kept each other looped in on the happenings of the kids.

From this experience I learned a lot about the importance of classroom management tools, especially when working with a broad range of ages. I also learned how to pick up on students' learning preferences quickly so that I could help them with school work in the ways that worked best for them. Throughout the semester I learned the importance of having an open classroom where students feel freedom to speak their mind and have discussions.That semester was extremely important in my development as a teacher.

English Teaching Assistant - Kinmen, Taiwan

For a year and a half I lived and worked in Kinmen, Taiwan. I was working in a small school (around 80 total students) with kindergarteners through sixth graders. For most of my classes I worked closely with an English teacher already at the school however, I had a few solo classes as well. With the youngest kids we focused on the alphabet and storytelling. With third thru sixth grade I had two main types of classes: English textbook classes and "culture" classes. In textbook classes we taught straight from their textbook or designed supplemental activities to help them better grasp concepts. In "culture" classes we had a lot more freedom to teach whatever we wanted, some examples of topics included holidays, friendship, shopping, and even cooking! two students faced away from us cooking in a pot

Every week I would meet with each of my co-teachers to plan the classes for the coming week. This gave us time to bounce ideas off each other, discuss what students needed more work on, and divide the prep work that had to be done before class. I learned a lot about teaming and working with others in a teaching setting that I hadn't had as much exposure to before.
As well as co-teaching, I also taught some solo classes. I had a storytelling class every week with the kindergarteners. In this class I would read English stories and use flashcards with the students. Throughout the first semester I was able to experiment and found what worked best with the students to hold their attention and make sure they were having fun with English. three students, back to, drawing on a blackboard

We would sing head, shoulders, knees, and toes (their favorite!), run around the classroom to point out different colors, and act out different animals before reading the book I chose. I had a lot of fun bring motion and simple games to the English language so that it was more exciting for them. During the first semester I was able to develop a routine with the students so we all knew generally what to expect each day. Some days they remembered better than me! I also had a solo class with my 3rd graders and another with my 4th grader. For at least one year with each we spent that class learning to read a more difficult book and reviewing concepts they may have needed a little more help with. students in matching green school shirts standing in a clump in preperation for a run My third graders spent a full semester learning to read and understand a longer, more challenging picture book. We then spent the second semester turning it into a reader's theater. This gave them the opportunity to practice speaking new English words in a more conversational way than they might typically use. I spent more time with the fourth graders on understanding the story fully. After reading a page I would ask them questions about what we read. This prompted critical reading skills and working to understand words in context, not just on their own.

Teaching these solo classes gave me a lot of opportunity to develop my own teaching style and methodologies. I struggled a lot with classroom management at first. It was particularly tricky since I only spoke English with the students which made it more difficult to reprimand and talk through problems with them. Gretchen standing in a group of students This extra challenge definitely encouraged me to test different management styles to find what worked. It helped to show me not one style can work with every class and certain students respond better to different management styles. The language barrier with the students, though difficult, gave me a lot of ideas and confidence in teach students. It forced me to find a lot of different ways to explain and show every concept so that they could better understand without any Mandarine. I know I can translate these skills to English speaking students because even when speaking the same language, all students learn in different ways. It is always a good idea to be prepared to teach and show examples in many ways not just one.