School Experience Overall

           There was definitely some mixed feelings as my School Experience came to a close but overall I am very happy. At the beginning of this practicum, I went in not having a clue how my classroom set up would go- the idea of three mentors with three different classes was extremely intimidating. We then figured out a schedule to where myself and Andrew would be able to work with all three of our mentors for the short practicum but would have to stick with one mentor for the long practicum when we return in February. During the final week some of the anxieties from the beginning of School Experience resurfaced during a bit of a schedule mix up but thankfully it is resolved and the new year looks promising once again.

            As the week was a phase out, I stepped back from being a prominent force in the classroom and acted as more of an observer. My goal from my fourth reflection was to observe students whose parents I did not meet during interviews so this was my concentration for the week. One of the major things I picked up during the interviews was that certain students showed extreme anxiety at home due mostly to workload. This is something that surprised me, mostly because of which parents said their children were having these troubles but with a closer look, I was able to notice signs that it was going to be a tough night with homework. My TM is very good at setting up assignments in class. The students are never expected to start something on their own, there is always an explanation and the whole class discusses the assignment before they are dismissed. It is when student are rushed that the anxiety comes out. If teachers do not plan effectively to recap a lesson, remind students of homework or refuse to answer questions that the students look harried and leave the class with a ‘look.’ This is something I will be planning for as I start my unit plans.

            The last two weeks have also been dedicated to building my final report for School Experience. Being able to see an example was very helpful in figuring out a template and for me, the rest went quite smoothly. I used our program goal outline sheet as a checklist and compared it to what I had reflected on in my personal journal. I actually was able to write my report quite quickly thanks to the effort I had put into reflecting.

            Overall, I am very happy with how the School Experience went. I had expected to be concentrating fully on my students and their learning but quickly found that I needed to balance my attention between them, scheduling, mentors and lesson planning. This woke me up to the realities of being a teacher. As I move forward into unit planning, I have confidence in my lesson planning abilities and look forward to planning with the my specific students in mind.

Collaboration Mural

The fruit of my labour!

I ended up teaching 2 and a half days last week. This project was a cross curricular Socials/ Fine Arts lesson where the students have been studying the United Nations and I was to introduce them to the Charter of Children's Rights.

First we read a page in their textbook that introduced the idea that children have specific rights and freedoms, why and when the Charter was created and then looked at a kid-friendly version of the actual document.

I then read "We Are All Born Free" to the students. This book was created by Amnesty International and is a collaboration of famous artists from around the world illustrating the Declaration of Human rights in the eyes of children. It is a beautiful compilation and the inspiration for the "FOR" assessment I used for this activity.

Collaboration Mural- Warning, it is a lot of prep! (but totally worth it)

First I typed the title of the book and the four categories of the Charter of Children's Rights into a word document, printed it, and divided it into 45 rectangles (9x5) to represent 45 pieces of paper. I then drew a line through each of the rectangles to create 90 sections and numbered them- one for each of my students.

 

 

Next I recreated this poster onto 45 pieces of paper. The model drawn on one piece of paper made it easy to understand what needed to be drawn on each section. I then cut each paper in half, just as I had with the sections in the model, gave one to each student and had them illustrate one of the articles in the Charter of Children's Rights to demonstrate what they look like- just as the artists had in "We Are All Born Free."

 

I demonstrated ways to integrate the symbols that may be on their piece of paper into their picture- some students loved it and some students traded with their friends who had a blank section. Overall, everyone was happy. 

 

The end result is a ginormous collaborative poster. The students loved coming in this morning and finding where their piece fit in or where their friends' was.

 

Although it took a lot of preparation on my part, I found this exercise an excellent way to see if the students 'got it' and a great example of integrating social justice and community.

Schedule Madness

This past week definitely flew by. From having a shortened week, shortened days and being insanely busy the entire time, I am not exactly surprised at the fast pace. The aim of this week was to teach two full days of classes so we understand the workload required and the physical toll we would experience. I ended up teaching two and a half days which was essentially the bulk of the classroom time for the whole week due to all of the interruptions. Wednesday and Thursday were early dismissals, at 1:38pm, due to parent teacher conferences and on Thursday, the high school put on an amazing Remembrance Day assembly. There was a representative from every grade participating from singing, dancing, reading essays, artwork and poetry. The school’s nurse brought in a Veteran from World War 2 and interviewed him in front of the school about his role in the war. He spoke of funny stories about his comrades, the frightening midnight trips on his motorcycle delivering messages from troop to troop and his overall message of his reluctance to share these stories as he does not feel that the war should be glorified; it was a very touching message.

The ultimate challenge this week was not the teaching- at this point I am very confident in front of my students- but the timing certainly was. I arranged with my TM that she would teach all day on Monday and the second half of Tuesday to wrap up what she had been doing with her students but the rest of the week was mine. Because of the restricted time, I only ended up teaching two different lessons to all three classes. The first class I did, I continued the class’ learning on the United Nations by introducing the Charter of Children’s rights. We read a page of the textbook together, I read a book produced by Amnesty International called “We are All Born Free” to the class and then had the students create individual posters illustrating one aspect of the Charter of Children’s rights similar to the illustrations from the book and then when all 90 posters are put together they create one giant collaborative poster. The lesson went over really well but very few of the students finished their poster so I ended up having to make my second Socials Studies lesson a work period to finish their posters. I opened the second class with a discussion about Remembrance day reinforced the ideas we had talked about in the first class by watching a video version of “We are All Born Free.” My Science lessons were similar in that I had an exciting activity in the first class and had a work period in the second that followed up on the activities accomplished in the first. Overall, this week I concentrated on classroom management by setting out my expectations and ensuring I followed through on them. The students were extremely respectful of my authority which I have to thank the connections I had been making with them the past month.

The second big thing that happened this week was parent teacher interviews. All three of our TM’s were extremely pro-active in having us participate but were a little worried about confidentiality and how some of the parents might feel having someone else in the room. Luckily, this was not an issue for all 24 of our interviews but just in case, I had printed off several copies of my introduction letter to use as reference. The interviews were extremely helpful. Not only was I able to gain experience in interacting with concerned parents but I was hearing details about my students from my TMs that I had not picked up on from my observations. I took really good notes in my notebook to use as a reference in creating future lesson plans and I was able to develop my experience with goal 11, having a strong connection with parents.

This week was a great experience in understanding the stress and flexibility of a classroom teacher. I was able to concentrate on setting the tone of my role in the classroom and it was extremely successful. I learned tons about my students from observing their work habits in groups and individually during work periods and from the surprises that came up during parent teacher interviews. At this point I am looking forward to wrapping up School Experience and going back to my cohort to collaborate on ideas on how to move forward with the information I have gathered. I will be spending this last week closely observing the students whose parents I did not meet during interviews in hopes to have more tidbits to use in planning my units for the new year.

Observations worth their weight in gold

Usually I reference my notebook for the past weeks happenings but this week was so busy that I didn’t make the time to reflect once. I need to ensure that no matter how busy I will be getting in the last few weeks of School Experience and during my long practicum that I make the time to stop and reflect on what is happening and my reactions to my classes. The requirements of the week were to teach three or four consecutive lessons to build experience in teaching a linked idea. The mentor I was with for the week was the math and PE teacher and we were able to arrange for me to teach three lessons in math, focussing on multiplication and introducing the formal algorithm. I was able to teach each of my three lessons three times and thus was able to recognize what was working and what was not and adjust.

            I was somewhat anxious for the planning of this week to begin as my teaching philosophy is quite different from the mentor I would be working under. I wanted to be able to implement technology such as the document camera and use manipulatives in introducing new topics, two things that this particular teacher does not use. I was pleasantly surprised that they were more than happy to let me try things out and gave me a lot of help in designing my lessons to be effective. The lessons themselves went over really well.

My first lesson was a continuation of the teacher’s previous lesson therefore I was able to focus on setting up my classroom management and establish my authority. My second lesson was on Halloween. I predicted that the students would be hyper and unfocused so I made sure I used manipulatives so they had something new to focus on. This lesson went really well and was a great introduction to my third lesson which dealt with a lot of heavy topics. This third lesson was heavily procedural as my teacher mentor wanted the students to learn the formal algorithm for multiplication, a procedural task in itself. I voiced that I wanted the students to understand why we use the algorithm and how it works and had a way of introducing this. My TM loved the idea and showed me another way to start out the algorithm, giving my lesson a very powerful three step process. The lesson was extremely successful, easily my favourite lesson I have taught to date.

All observations from this week have been amazingly helpful. They have allowed me to really put program goal 5, working with feedback, to use. I was even able to get Andrew to sit in on one of my lessons and do an informal observation. This was great as he knows the specific methods we have learnt in classes and has an idea of what I am trying to accomplish. His feedback as well as the feedback from my Teacher mentor and Faculty mentor will be part of my focus in creating lesson plans for the coming week.