Declaration

All of the written work on this blog site is my own, unless referenced otherwise.

The content of this blog has not been changed at all since 8th October, 2010

K. White 13.10.10

How Well Did I Achieve My Goals?

To know my students and how they learn

I felt that I accomplished this incredibly well. I entered the school with an attitude of amazement at all the different ethnicities within the school and wanted the girls to teach me about their culture. The way in which I did this was to involve myself in extra curricular activities, lunchtime duties and occasionally classroom chitchat. I asked about their social lives, what they liked to do on weekends, families and even asked a Samoan friend to help me with the pronunciation of names (as I had a lot of pacific island students in my class). It was amazing how well they responded to my enthusiasm about their culture. I then attempted to incorporate this into my classes as best I could. The pacific island students in my year 9 History class researched about the kanakas in Queensland and the white Australia policy as something that directly impacted upon their background. I asked the students with Asian ethnicity to research Quong Tart and the treatment of Asian workers in Australia. I found that relating their background to something in history made it more relevant for them and thus more engaging.

To create and maintain a safe and challenging learning environments

I focused on this aspect by planning activities for students who essentially were refusing to do any work. I had two of these students in a year 9 and a year 7 class, and the way to their learning heart – technology. By incorporating a form of technology and a specific role for them, they increasingly felt comfortable to engage in class. Strategies such as doing a mind map of the board, then asking my ‘difficult’ students to take photos of it on her iphone and then reconstruct the mind map for everyone in the class, or asking the year 9 student to be in charge of collection of a slideshow task.

I also ensured in all classes involved humour and I was always happy to laugh at myself and my mistakes, wanting to ensure students were comfortable and felt secure enough to answer questions or give ideas (even if they were wrong). Another tip I was given to further this by my colleague teacher was to not move on from a student with an incorrect answer but to give prompts and clues to help them get to the correct answer. This was a very helpful tip!

The next goal I have set, moving on from this one, is to create a balance in my classes where both high achievers, average students, behaviorally different students and those with learning difficulties all have their needs met.

To plan, assess and report for effective learning

This internship had a very big ICT focus for myself. I wanted to really involve different technologies in my classes and learn how to implement them effectively. Computer lessons, webquests, slideshows, documentaries, video clips, filming, interactive games, active boards, iphones, laptops, are all the various technologies I used in different ways to engage students. I also have began using the ideas of the schools 21^st Century Learning Committee, which is a group of teachers who find and implement and their share a whole range of different ICT ideas. I think that my emphasis on providing ‘appropriate and engaging resources and materials to support student learning’ was met through my enthusiasm and practical implementation of various ICT resources.

The next step of the goal is to refine the way in which these are implemented to ensure effective learning.

Parents and Caregivers Assistance to Their Childs Education

The role of parents and caregivers in the education development of their child is enormously significant. Parents/ caregivers can provide support for their child in a variety of ways such as helping with schoolwork, simply taking an interest in what their child is learning about, encouraging and enforcing the doing of homework and assessments and supporting the teacher in terms of discipline. During my internship I witnessed daily the interaction of parents and teachers and how this can help or not help the students learning. Many time teachers could not even communicate with parents/ caregivers and this made it difficult to a. let the parents/ caregivers how their child is doing and b. communicate on how to help and improve the students learning. Sitting next to the stage 4 coordinator also helped me in learning how important the relationship between school and parents/ caregivers is. A specific example at school which shows how significant the role of parents/ caregivers is was in relation to a student who suffered from ADHD and also had major behavioural issues. Her step - mother decided to volunteer in the library two days a week in order to help teachers and the student when she got out on hand. Having the students step - mother at school made it incredibly easy to communicate and share ideas on how to manage the student and essentially help her to learn. Her presence also ensured the teachers that the parents/ caregivers were going to support the student at home as well. Although it is not the norm to have a parent in the school, it was a great way to see how important the role of parents/ caregivers is and in particular how effective communication between home and school can really assist in a childs educational development.

Improving My Teaching # 3

The final experience I wish to address occurred not with one of my classes but while I was supervising year 10 playing indoor soccer for sport on Thursday afternoons. The girls were playing underneath the library in an open undercover section in the school. The roof was quite low so the girls were instructed that not hard kicks were not allowed. However as the game went on it became apparent that the two teams had students in them that were ‘enemies’. The game began to escalate in terms of its roughness and silliness so I stopped them and told them all to relax and calm down for a few minutes and then we would resume the game if they could play properly. I also warned the girls that anyone with dangerous behaviour would be ‘red carded’ and would have to sit next to me on the sideline. The game was resume five minutes later and majority of the girls had taken the instructions on and played a safe fun game. During the afternoon a teacher came down to talk to me and in the few minutes my head was turned, one student had set up a penalty kick not even 2 meters from the goalie. She obviously got the goal and luckily did not hurt the student who was on goals. However when I noticed what had happened out of the corner of my eye I immediately stopped the game and disallowed the point. The student who was kicked the penalty began asking why it was disallowed. I explained that it was dangerous to kick a ball at another student that class and reminded her I had explained dangerous behaviour would not be tolerated. She began arguing back with comments such as ‘how is that too close’, ‘I play indoor soccer, that was enough room’ and ‘you don’t know anything about soccer’. Rather than instructing her to sit down, I engaged in the argument with her, wanting to prove her wrong and make her admit she knew it was dangerous.

This was my mistake. According to Linsin (2010) fighting with students is stressful, makes you lose your cool, causes you to behave in a manner you’ll regret, wastes time, creates friction between you and your students, makes you less likeable and encourages students to challenge your authority. Linsin (2010) also outlines five steps in which to avoid fighting with students.

1. Follow Your Classroom Management Plan – Arguments begin when the teacher asks a student to stop doing something rather than enforcing a consequence.

2. Give A Warning – Your classroom management plan should include a warning for the first offense.

3. Move On – After giving a warning, or a time-out if it’s a second offense, turn away from the student immediately and continue with whatever you were doing. Don’t give your students an opportunity to argue or explain their behavior. There is no need.

4. Pause/Repeat – If you find yourself in a situation where a student is determined to stand in front of you to plead his or her case, maintain eye contact, pause several seconds, and then repeat the warning.

5. Enforce A Consequence For Arguing – If the student continues to argue, enforce the second consequence.

I think that step 3 is the time in which to quell the argument with students. Rather than engaging in the argument with the student to make her and others see she was wrong, I should have given her an individual warning and moved on. Or the other option I could have taken was to immediately implement the consequence of sitting down next to me as the class had already received a warning. In future situations I will move on from the warning rather then attempting to prove a student wrong.

References

Linsin, M. (2010). Why You Should Never Argue With Students; And How to Avoid It. Retrieved from: http://www.smartclassroommanagement.com/2010/01/23/why-you-should-never-argue-with-students-and-how-to-avoid-it/

Improving My Teaching # 2

The second experience that caused me to evaluate my teaching methods (specifically my classroom management skills) was with year 7 history. The class went smoothly as students worked in pairs to write a transcript for a conversation between two Indigenous peoples on the topic of contact and colonisation. However due to previous bad behaviour I had spilt up two students (student A and student B) who constantly distracted each other and the class. Student A approached me asking to work with another student that I was worried could also be talkative and distracting. However they bargained with me by agreeing to perform their conversation to the class. I aloud them to work together and was pleased to see that they worked very well together. The problem came when student B became upset with who she was working with (as they weren’t friends) and decided to do no work at all. I spoke to student B after class and listened to her explain to me that when I aloud Student A to work with a friend and not Student B she felt left out. I explained that she needed to work well in class if she wanted to work with friends. I had been made to feel unfair and began trying to rectify it by agreeing that I would attempt not to exclude her when classmates got to work with friends. She sat there with puppy dog eyes until she had gotten what she wanted and then left the class with not a care about what I had said to her.

There were two problems within this class that I felt I needed to improve upon. Firstly the implementation of group / pair work and secondly my execution of classroom management strategies. In order to improve in these two areas I made sure that I was incredibly planned and organised for group/ pair work and had come prepared with management strategies. Such as, seating plans, clearly communicating expectations, giving distracting students specific responsibilities in class and addressing talking students by name.

In terms of groups work, “if the relationships between grouping size, interaction type and learning tasks in groups are planned strategically then learning experiences will be more effective. However, research suggests that the relationships between these elements are often unplanned and the ‘social pedagogic’ potential of classroom learning is therefore unrealized” (Blatchford, Kutnick, Baines & Galton, 2003). I had not planned whom I was going to pair the two distracting students with (let alone the rest of the class). I was lucky enough that the class were enthusiastic about the task and worked well even when given the choice to work with a friend. However the case of student A and student B is a perfect example of how not pre determining group composition can lessen the learning potential of the class (such as in the case of student B).

Blatchford, Kutnick, Baines & Galton (2003) argue that a compromise to allowing students to choose their own groups/ pairs would be to involve students in the decision making about “criteria to use when composing the groups” as well as asking students to consider the “advantages of working with peers other than their close friends”.

The next opportunity I have to implement group work, I will ensure to try out the strategy of involving students in this decision making process, as well as having my set classroom management strategies.

References

Blatchford, P., Kutnick, P., Baines, E. & Galton, M. (2003). Towards a Social Pedagogy of Classroom Group Work. London, Institution of Education, University of London

Improving My Teaching

My first lesson left me feeling incredibly defeated. After gaining previous experience teaching a yr 11 Ancient History class of 15 boys, I was totally underprepared for what 26, year 9 girls could be like. The lesson was a teacher-fueled discussion, revising the skills of analyzing sources. Battling nervousness, a new teacher up the back plus a university supervisor and 26 new faces, I struggled to clearly communicate and get across the information to the girls. They couldn’t follow my board work as it was not set out clearly, they knew far less than what I had expected, and simply they just looked bored (which did not lift my confidence at all.

In order to not have a repeat of this lesson I reflected on what went wrong, what worked, what needed to scrapped or tweaked, what was engaging, and what management strategies work.

David Nockles’ Student Perception of Effective Schooling discusses research that shows “students perceive good teachers and good teaching skills as essential in effective schools. The students were explicit in their desire to have teachers well grounded in their subject area, as well as possessing ability to communicate and impart their knowledge to students well. Many students spoke about learning styles and measured good teachers as not only those that taught them well, but ones that had a diversity of teaching approaches and were able to engage all the students at different times and in different ways. Nevertheless the most important element of a good teacher was one with whom an individual was able to communicate”.

My problem with this lesson can come down to just one thing – lack of preparation. The NSW Institute of Teachers, element 3 requires me to ‘plan and implement coherent lessons and lesson sequences that are designed to engage students and address learning outcomes’. My lack of preparation resulted in my not being able to do this. Having a well thought out and structured lesson would have allowed the students to follow what was going on and would have made my message a lot clearer. Also having an organized lesson would have enabled me to use teaching methodologies that met a range of different learning types and more actively engaged students.

References

Nockles, D., Student Perception of Effective Schooling. University of Sydney, Australia. Retrieved 16^th September 2010, available at; http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/5322

My Teaching Goals

To know my students and how they learn

• having been placed at a incredibly multicultural school for my internship i placed a lot of emphasis not only on wanting to develop my skills of differentiation but to also develop rapport with the students by learning about them and their interests (and use this as a way to engage them in class).

To create and maintain a safe and challenging learning environments

• specifically I wanted to create a classroom environment where all class members want to and feel comfortable engaging in class activities.
• After my previous 3 week practical block, i had felt that some students had 'fallen through the cracks' of my teaching methodologies. This internship I wanted to find methods in which to include and inspire usually uninterested students.

To plan, assess and report for effective learning

• continuing on from my previous goal, I felt that apart of creating this environment was to use a range of 'appropriate and engaging resources and materials to support student learning'.
• I aimed to activitly seek out ICT resouces and programs as a way in which to interest, normally disengaged students.