Blog 1 - Practicum experience

Over the course of my practicum, I have been able to see a glimpse into the life of a teacher and their students. My time in W.O Mitchell has been a great learning experience that has taught me practical lessons such as to have a backup plan in case something goes wrong and to always have more work than you need in case the students finish their work faster than anticipated. The first step when developing the unit plan I wanted to do was deciding how I wanted to end the lesson. I decided that at the end of the year I hope to have the students create a poetry portfolio that includes at least 5 poems (specifics are TBD - however, I will include that they need to write a Narrative and an Ode) to which they will need to choose 2 poems to reflect on using the guiding questions and/or things we've discussed in class. I will need to vary this instruction not only7 by grade level but also for the modifications, IEP, and ELL students. ( This will come later when I've developed more on the summative task and assessed what they remember after the break. As I will only have Wednesdays with them, I plan to do a review in January on the genres of poetry and figurative language before using my Wednesdays as a writing workshop time.

Over the course of my three weeks, I was able to go through a lot with the students, however, I learned that I need to work on my timing for lessons. This was brought up by my AT as something to improve upon but also something that even the most experienced teachers have difficulty with sometimes. What I've gained from my experience is to always have a backup plan and to make sure you have more work than what you think is needed in case students finish what you had for the lesson.

I found that after I found out where everyone was at with poetry, it was easy to narrow down what I wanted to do. What I found more difficult was to modify the grade level lesson down to a grade 4 level for one of the students in my class. Not only did I have to find something more manageable that was within the same realm of things as what I was doing but I also had to make sure that it wasn't too little or too much for the student. This was challenging at times because I go into the class with an expectation of varied grade levels but not a considerable difference between a gr4 level and gr7 level.

What I found the most valuable to my learning was to learn about the interests of my class. Knowing how to connect with students and engage them in their learning through video games, music or a need to understand and learn more helps me with using that to my advantage in the course work I will be doing in the new year. I want to be able to integrate these interests as much as possible into what I'm teaching so that even the students who are the least engaged will be able to actively participate.

My goals for the coming year will be to integrate more and more culturally relevant material into the lessons and to get students to engage with their interests and prior knowledge. Professionally, I hope to continue to practice my timing and lesson planning so that I have a more clear view of my overall unit and summative task.

Not only have I grown as a teacher candidate in my knowledge and skills but I have also begun to create and cultivate a plethora of communities of inquiry. Within my cohort and my school, I have been able to learn from my school's community and teach fellow teacher candidates about my own experiences and lessons learned through my practicum experience. Being able to apply my in-class experience and reflection into my practicum has been an eye-opening experience for my newly chosen profession.

Thinking back to my prior experiences in a classroom and what I could have done differently, I would have created more structured approaches to subjects depending on the student. Using more or less scaffolding to help with student success would have given me more structure in my classroom setting. Being able to compare my experience then to the one I am currently living offers an insight into my journey as a teacher.

Overall, I have been able to create and cultivate relationships, experiences, and connections through the 3-week block of practicum that I hope to maintain and continue to expand on throughout my next year and a half in this program.