Solving Problems/Improving Leadership at Youth Life

This week was my first experience in planning lessons and leading a classroom of students. Though the leadership at my site gave me the tools on how to handle behavioral situations with my students, I did not receive much training on how to do the actual teaching. I have had no prior training on the best methods to teach students, so I have had to figure it out through trial and error. I also do not know what topics these students must understand before they go back to school in the fall and was not given any resources as to how to figure this out. Basically, I had to use the internet (mostly pinterest) to tackle the task of lesson planning for rising first graders in reading and rising fourth graders in math. I understand that Youth Life is not directly affiliated with the education system and does not have the resources that teachers are given by the state, but their summer program would be enhanced if there was either more training or more resources for the interns to pull from. Although the leadership has done a good job of answering my questions, they have been focused on planning their lessons for their own reading and math groups. Consequently, there is little collaboration between colleagues on pooling resources of lesson ideas. I feel as if I was thrown into the situation with no support or resources to effectively teach my students. After just one week I am feeling more confident in my teaching abilities and lesson plans but this is not due to the support of the leadership. In order to solve this problem for next year, the first week of training should be more focused on lesson planning since that is the bulk of my job as an intern. One of Youth Life’s core values is academic success and I feel as if I was not given the resources to ensure that for my students.