This year’s teachers at Prairie High School like Mrs.Claflin and Mr. Spencer use organizing skills and past experiences to prepare for students and be better teachers.
Mrs. Claflin has been teaching for 18 years now, and has been a great teacher for all her students. Students say they wish they had more teachers like Mrs.Claflin. Claflin says the most important thing she does to make sure her students are ready to learn for the week is “making sure I’m prepared, if I have everything prepared and ready to go then I know everything will be in order and I can make sure my students are ready to learn.”
Mrs Claflin says “I’m pretty organized, I don’t like to be flying by the top of my pants, I don’t really have strategies, I just get it done.” It all comes from experience, from many years of teaching she knows what she should do to make her students learn and stay on schedule and not be all over the place.
Mr. Spencer says “I use turn-in baskets, check lists and I try to keep my stuff in order to date”, all his online assignments are auto graded which is a helpful tool for him and makes It less stressful to grade everything.
The tasks that take up the majority of his and all teachers’ time are grading tests, lesson planning and grading assignments. A time Spencer had a challenging time was last year when all the math teachers were in a rush and didn’t finish topic 4, “that was really wild.” He’s now trying to make sure all his classes are on task and doing the right things.
The way Claflin ensures all standards are covered she says “I feel like all standards are similar, If you’re covering one, you’re covering the other. Reading comprehension and finding text evidence are the most important as long as we cover those I think the standards are being covered.”
Claflin likes to multitask and gets everything done together, he likes to lock himself in the class and get all his work done. When Spencer is a little lost or confused he always goes to Mr. Olman and asks for help 90% of the time.
Most teachers set healthy boundaries for themselves and stick to them to make sure they do everything on time for the students to come to school and have a good plan to follow everyday during the week.
