Practicum Placement #1 – Walkerville Collegiate Institute – October 19-30, 2015
My first practicum placement was extremely eye opening and quite frankly not as scary as I had imagined. Though I have only been out of high school for just over five years, things have changed dramatically. One of the weirdest things was being in a high school that was not my own. I initially felt like an outsider in a big world, sort of the feeling you have when you are a grade nine entering high school but that quickly changed once I met some of the teachers and got to know the school layout. The teachers all welcomed the student teachers, as there are seven of us, with open arms. After getting a feel for the school layout and being introduced to other faculty members, I found myself walking confidently into the building each morning. By the end of the two weeks, I feel like I had built some good relations with staff members within the school and this feeling of being welcomed, as part of the school community was nice.
One of the most interesting things in the schools is the change in technology. All students have a cellphone and they’re allowed to use them in the classroom. The school policy now focuses on privacy and therefore teachers cannot take them from a student. I found when I was teaching they did not use them as much, but their presence in the classroom affected student learning in a way I was not used to. One of the assignments I gave my students had an answer that was directly from the Internet. This was a learning curve I faced with trying to deal with students who used cellphones and students who were temperamental about their phones. The other thing I found interesting was because my placement school, Walkerville, is an old school there was minimal technology in the classroom. I was sort of expecting a classroom with white boards, smart boards, and a class set of iPod’s as we have learned we would be using in classes but that was most definitely not the case. The teacher had a projector but rarely used it other than playing a film and hardly ever wrote notes on the board. My associate told me that the school did provide him with a laptop and projector to use but it often faced glitches and worked very slowly so it was best to just use your own laptop.
One of the other things I found challenging was disagreement with the way my associate lead their classroom. Though nothing was downright awful and needed to be reported, I just found myself disagreeing with them on classroom management and how I think I would have handled some situations. This really brought me back to my teaching philosophy and proved that my beliefs were stronger than I thought. There were instances where I thought handling a students behaviour would be best dealt with one way but the teacher approached it another. Being able to see how other teachers handle behaviour issues taught me a lot of patience with students I might not have initially had and it taught me that student specific needs must be understood. She kept in mind their IEP’s and when dealing with classroom behaviour she mentioned to always keep those in mind.
When I began teaching I found students had a respect for me without me having to work too hard to gain it. I think the respect they had for their teacher transferred to me and that was a welcoming experience. Students were open to my lessons and participated in class discussions with great enthusiasm. I actually changed one of my lessons last minutes because of the positive feedback I received from my students. The students seemed to have enjoyed me being there, though I cant say for sure. I felt that leaving placement this time was difficult but it will be nice to be heading back to the same classroom with students I have already built a rapport with.