Domain: Professional Knowledge.
Standard one: Know your students and how they learn. Standard two: Know the content and how to teach it.
Reflective Commentary
In keeping with my philosophy of group work I believed by students would get more out of the lesson if they were sitting in groups in order to begin with lots of think pair share type of activities. I was able to move the desks in the room to my liking and put the students in groups of six, while this was successful for most students as the term went along, I was able to identify that certain students could not work in a group all day every day. The result being, four groups of six tables joined, and one straight row at the front of six students. Those front six were often asked to form pairs, but anything bigger than that usually had negative implications for those students. It was a great lesson learnt for me; partly as I had wrongly assumed all students by year six would be able to work in a group. Secondly I had improved my practice because of this and was able to keep behaviour management at a minimum.
I had been told that some reward systems in this class had failed and that it was up to me if I wanted to introduce one. I considered the students in the class and decided to set up a linked class and group reward system as well as an individual reward system. While the individual reward system worked consistently for the whole term, the class and group reward seemed to become ineffective after week seven.
Being strongly aware that some of my students did not have the knowledge of being able to read each other, I introduced a weekly drama session where we worked on Tableau and emotions. The students began to look forward to this session and I felt it also extended their creative writing skills.
As my class was working at many levels, I continued to use a variety of mediums to promote learning, strong use of IWB and smart board programs, YouTube videos, podcasts as well as school based maths resources. I was able to borrow information from the One World Centre for connections in the SOSE unit. I built displays to help engage students in the finding out stage of a new topic. The students were constantly interacting with the resources during lessons and I believe this instrumental in their discovery of empathy in the immigration task.
I was lucky to attend the professional development day at the beginning of this term where the GIRN specialist was taking us through mental maths instructional strategies that this school would be teaching all the students from grade one to seven. The terminology based Blake’s posters from the National Maths Strategies (2007) was new to me, as was the many different ways to teach addition and subtraction. On reflection they are what most people do in their head automatically, but what it taught both the students and I was, that there is usually more than one correct way to get the answer. Each time we practiced these strategies I would differentiate for the students by giving two columns of work, Colum A and a harder Colum B as well as using the magic number as an extension activity for those that finished early.
One component of our literacy curriculum was Poetry. I began with explicitly teaching students about Haiku and its origin. When it came to writing a Haiku, the students began by creating a spider gram, and then moved forward from there. It was a great way of scaffolding their knowledge by using a known concept to build on. The students produced some great haiku and I had students volunteer to add to our Haiku Poetry- tree each time they had five minutes of finishing off time.
ACTION PLAN
During my professional internship I was given SOSE and the Class novel that I was able to program and lesson plan to my own style. With all my planning I begin with Term Planners, then break it down to week-by-week, as well as ensuring there is cross curriculum representation.
I found using the TOPS website was a big help, although I will endeavor to do the professional development course put out by the SSTUWA to execute a streamlined planning process.
I prefer to develop my classroom practice around a theme and encompass all parts of the curriculum this way. I plan to complete the next TOPS training by February 2013
First steps is a resource that I am familiar for Numeracy and Literacy, but I have not used it extensively and would like to complete a course so I can understand the key to diagnostic testing. I would like to complete this by the end of 2014.
