Practicum Reflection

EDUC-4260

Dr. Wayne Melville

January 16, 2017

By: Imran Malik

 When I first decided to pursue a degree in education, with the
goal of becoming a high school science teacher, my initial worry was
that after six years I may have forgotten the content. I soon realized
that the content can be studied and re-learned, however the ability to
manage a classroom seemed much more skilful and more of a
daunting task. I quickly thought back to my time as a tennis and soccer
coach/instructor, this gave me a sense of calm as I remembered that I
am good at managing groups of children. Within two days of entering
the classroom I had found out that this was an entirely different
challenge, and that maybe I wasnt as sure of myself as I had thought.

Knowledge of Self

During the past year Ive spent quite a lot of time trying to
understand my thoughts and my emotions. I generally think of myself
as quite a calm person, however my first experience teaching a lesson
in the classroom was a big wake-up call. It was my second observation
day, we had a supply teacher, she took the Grade 8s and I took the
Grade 7s. I was to teach them a complex lesson on geographical
mapping, and by the end of it I was questioning whether I had made
the right decision leaving full-time work to pursue a career as a
teacher. Not only did the students show little interest in the lesson, but
they constantly fighting with each other, throwing textbooks and
pencils, and showing no respect for what I had to say.

After one fifty-minute lesson I had already realized that I wasnt

as calm as I thought, and had great feelings of frustration and stress.
My initial question to myself was why didnt these students show me
the respect that I usually receive when coaching? I believe the answer
lies in the fact that when coaching sports the children usually know
that I am fairly good at the sport, and so already have respect for my
skill, whereas coming into the classroom as a student teacher I had to
gain their respect, it wouldnt simply be given to me because Im an
adult and in a position of authority. As I watched the students interact
with other student teachers and supply teachers over the coming
weeks, it became clear to me that they would push the limits and
boundaries with each new teacher, seeing what they could get away
with. I learned that as a teacher it is of utmost importance that one
does not take student behaviour as a personal attack, but rather see it
as part of a larger picture of student behaviour as a whole. Respect
had to be earned amongst these students.

I think one of my best qualities as a teacher is my ability to relate

to students on a personal level. I was often told growing up that I am a
chameleon, in that I often change my behaviour to fit in with a
particular group. While this is something that I have tried to work on,
becoming more comfortable with being myself regardless of the
situation, I believe the ability to adjust ones behaviour to suit a
particular student, or group of students, is something that may be
beneficial as a teacher. One of the best things I did during my
practicum was to relate to the students on a personal level. Being a
student teacher this is likely easier done than being the sole full-time
teacher, but this really helped me gain their trust and respect. Once
the students saw that I enjoyed spending time with them and getting
to know them as people, I found they were much more respectful of my
lessons, more willing to listen to my advice, and much more willing to
work because they didnt want to feel as though they were letting me
down.

After building sincere personal relationships with the students

they really did see me as one of them, as a friend who was pursuing an
education like them, and who they wanted to succeed. I found that
although this led to a much more fun and friendly classroom
environment, it often led to the students pushing the boundaries,
feeling that Mr. Malik is our friend, he wont get us into any trouble.
Due to this it was important for me to establish myself as an authority
figure as well, not just as friendly Mr. Malik. In fact I had to send two
students to the office because they werent respecting my numerous
requests to behave, realizing that this was a moment where I can
either remain as the fun student teacher, or assert myself as an
authority figure as well. Although this led to some initial fight-back by
those two students, they soon accepted that their behaviour had given
me no choice, and that I was their friend, but that more importantly I
was an authority figure, there to help them learn and grown as
students and as people.

Practicum taught me a lot about myself, in one month my

confidence went from reasonably high, to quite low, to quite confident
again. From this experience, including observing other teachers and
their behaviours, I believe that having a thick skin is a requirement of a
successful teacher. Students are always going to have their good and
their bad days, as a teacher it is of utmost importance that we do not
take these variations in behaviour as a personal attack. I observed
some teachers allowing students misbehaviour to bring their own
mood down, and in some cases to ruin their whole day. This often fed
back into the students behaviour, starting a cycle of misbehaviour,
improper teacher reaction, further misbehaviour. I think it is too easy
for teachers to simply analyze student behaviour without thinking
about the underlying student emotion that led to that behaviour, thus
leading to them improperly dealing with the situation. I think that
having empathy for the student and understanding that their
behaviour often is associated with an underlying personal emotion is
something that I am going to work on during my teaching career, as I
believe it is of great importance in maintaining a good classroom
environment.

General Pedagogical Knowledge

During our first semester classes, we were fortunate enough to

spend quite a bit of time practicing lesson planning. This definitely
helped during placement, and was necessary knowledge to have going
in. However, as soon as I started teaching my own lessons, it became
apparent that the timing of a lesson is tough to judge. Often I was
planning lessons that were too long for the allotted time period, mainly
due to the fact that some students needed a lot more time to complete
their work. Building more flexibility into my lesson planning was
something I tried to work on during my practicum, and is something
that I will definitely continue to work on as I go forward, an area in
which I have a lot of room for improvement.

Another area I believe I have a lot of room for improvement in is

my range of teaching and organisational strategies. I think I am still
developing ideas on how to present my material in interesting and fun
ways. Again I was fortunate enough to have had the chance to observe
some of my peers perform mini-lessons during our classes, and so was
able to use some of their ideas and apply them to my lessons during
practicum. It was also clear that my AT was very organized in her
planning, marking, and in the way she stored her material.
Organization will be a focus of mine as I start my own teaching career,
as it is an area that I have sometimes been lacking in. I think the use of
technology, in particular as a way of storing lesson plans and marks, is
an area in which I have much room to grow, but I am confident that I
will improve quickly given time.
 As the days went on, I gained more and more knowledge of my
students, what worked well for them, and what didnt work well. Being
in a classroom with an AT gave me a lot of opportunity to spend time
with individual students, or with small groups of students, which
allowed me to get to know each of them personally. This was of great
benefit to me, and was a great help in planning my lessons, allowing
me to construct lessons to try and maximize their participation. Our
school had a population of about 70-80% indigenous students, as well
as having 30-40% of the students below the poverty line. I am aware
that my lesson planning and what I learned during this practicum may
not quite translate over to my next practicum. I am a bit concerned
about the jump in content difficulty during my next practicum, as I will
likely be in a high school, however I am confident that my experience
gained managing a tough classroom during this past practicum will be
of great benefit to my future.

Empirical and Cognitive Learning

As I mentioned, I was fortunate enough to get to know my

students very well during my five weeks at the school. They definitely
had a great impact on my lesson planning, as they were not quite what
I had expected. I think the biggest thing that shocked me in our
classroom was the overall laziness of the students, not only in terms of
doing classroom work, but also general laziness overall. We had a few
students who were great students; always willing to work hard and
quite intelligent and energetic as well, but for the most part it was hard
to convince the students to do much work.

This affected the difficulty levels of my lessons, as I had to simply

them a lot, and also affected what I could plan in order to maximize
participation while trying to present enough information in a lesson.
The fifty-minute periods often felt a bit rushed, but were quite easy to
fill. Ive also learned in my classes and during my time at the hospital,
that indigenous learners usually prefer visually based lessons, with
more emphasis on story telling, as opposed to having to sit through a
lecture. I attempted to make my lessons as interactive as possible,
using a lot of video clips and images. I think this definitely led to a
more interactive classroom environment, and encouraged student
participation, as well as discussion with each other. This is an area that
I will continue to work to build, as I think most students probably prefer
to be involved in the lesson, rather than just sitting, listening and
copying notes. Again there is a chance that this may be different in
some of the more academic high school classrooms, so I will be
prepared to continue adapting my lesson plans to try and maximize
learning for my current group of students.

My knowledge of student learning also greatly affected my

assessment techniques. I was fortunate again to have an AT who was
open to different methods of assessment, and didnt often give grades,
but rather provided a lot of written feedback to the students. I think
this method worked best for our group of students, as they had a lot of
room for improvement, and sitting and discussing feedback with them
seemed to help the most. During my unit on quality of life for
geography class, it became apparent that many students hadnt quite
grasped the main concepts as we were nearing the end of the unit, so
we actually did a review of everything that was to be on the unit-
ending test, question by question. This led to much higher marks than I
had expected on the test, although it is hard to judge whether this was
more due to memorization or actual understanding of the concepts.
This also greatly influenced my planning for my language how to write
a book review unit. For this unit I broke my lessons down and went
through each part of a review piece by piece, class by class, and
assessed learning at each stage of the review. This definitely helped
students keep up with the rest of the class, and seemed to make the
task as a whole easier for the students to manage.

Conclusion

My first practicum experience was one that I will cherish for a

long time to come. I had a lot of fun with the students and other
teachers, and learned a great deal about how a school runs, how good
teachers work as a unit, and some techniques on how to manage unit
planning and adolescent students. I will have to continue to build my
use of technology in the classroom, and to improve scaffolding my
units and lessons, breaking them into more manageable pieces, based
on classroom ability. I am grateful that I had a chance to plan a few
units on my own, and with feedback from my AT, I believe that I
learned a great deal about how to do this. I am aware that my next
practicum may not go as well as this one did, but I am now confident
that I made the right decision moving into education, and I do think
that this field will bring out the best in me, because I am passionate
about working with students.