School of Education

Professional Practice 3
102605 Secondary PP Community Engagement
Self Reflection Form

Pre-service Teacher Details

Pre-service Teacher Name: Pre-service Teacher ID:

Mitchell Cavens 18067691
Pre-service Teacher Phone Number: Pre-service Teacher Email Address:
0434920546 18067691@student.westernsydney.edu.au

Placement Details: If you haven’t complete 60 hours face to face you must provide a
detailed statement of how your experience meets the outcomes for Professional
Practice CE. Attach evidence.

Placement Name: Placement Phone Number: 02 9836 3602

Rouse Hill High School
Placement Address: 105 Withers Road, Rouse Placement Email Address:
Hill, NSW, 2155, AUSTRALIA Richard.Medcalf@det.nsw.edu.au

Contact Person:
Richard Medcalf

Describe in about 500 WORDS any features and benefits of the setting you attended. Consider
number of students, location details, age of students, types of educational programs offered and any
other salient aspects of the experience. Consider how this experience will contribute to your
development as a beginning teacher.

AITSL Standards

The criteria for pre-service teacher reflection focus, the first, second, third and sixth standards.
 1.3 Students with diverse linguistic, cultural, religious and socioeconomic backgrounds
 1.5 Differentiate teaching to meet the specific learning needs of students across the full
range of abilities
 2.2 Content selection and organisation
 3.1 Establish challenging learning goals
 6.3 Engage with colleagues and improve practice

Subsidiary questions:
What surprised you about your learning in your community setting?
What research about communities did you engage with before you commenced?
What goals did you set for yourself in your service learning activities?
What do you believe the participants in your service learning project learned?
What did you learn? How will the experience shape you as a teacher in a classroom?
Check Due Date accompanied by your Timesheet and signed Report.
Submissions after due date will receive an N grade. At the following HECS census date, if
the work is still incomplete, this will become an AF grade. This is University policy.
The AF grade can be changed when you complete the work. You must also keep a hard or
electronic copy of your assignment.
 Submit this form online via InPlace. Your PPCE Report written by the Contract
Person, is mailed by them or delivered by you to the PP office in the SOE.

Reflection:

This experience at Rouse Hill High School proved very valuable to me for a number of
reasons. Firstly, this practicum provided many opportunities to spend time with and develop
a variety of students’ skills in the realm of music and sound. These students were from years
7-12, and came from a variety of socio-economic, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds. This
meant that I had to differentiate my pedagogical approaches in response to student diversity,
as well as improving my ability to clearly instruct. This skill was particularly honed through
the role of aiding students with learning difficulties in the music classroom.

There were few opportunities within this practicum to organise my own lesson or educational
activity for the students, however the benefit of this was it focussed my full attention to more
inter-personal teaching, presenting me with the opportunity to provide meaningful feedback
and instruction to students. Through my instruction and guidance, students learned a variety
of musical skills such as the ability to effectively compose creatively as a small ensemble, the
ability to effectively individually compose on notational software, as well as how to effectively
make use of sound technologies in live performance.

A specific activity which proved an extremely valuable experience for me was the opportunity
to organise and run the sound/video/set up/stage organisation for a combined schools
performance night. This extra-curricular activity required a lot of organisation and clear
instruction to students, as well as an opportunity to train students in the use of the sound
system and general stage management. The reason why this was an extremely valuable
experience for me was because my original goal in this practicum was to further develop an
understanding of how a music teacher practically organises and carries out an extra-
curricular activity like a performance night or a performance outing, as my previous
practicums were entirely focussed on classroom experience as a teacher and I was unsure and
worried about my ability to undertake those tasks. Thankfully, this practicum provided me
with many more extra-curricular experiences such as the opportunity to participate in the
school concert band, vocal group, and guitar ensemble. The combination of these experiences
meant that even after 60 hours of experience in the school, I felt as if I had achieved the goal I
had set out to attain.

This experience also proved valuable in helping me develop professional relationships with
colleagues in order to improve my own practice. Practically, I had two supervisory teachers,
one of which was a practicum student from WSU. All of us regularly spent time together
providing the practicum student with feedback, as well as reflecting on the supervisors’
lessons. The practicum student and I spent a lot of time brainstorming effective lesson ideas
and reflecting on what worked and what did not work. Through these experiences, I learnt
that in my own teaching practice, constant critical self-reflection is vital in improving my
teaching practice. I also had the opportunity to carry out a research project on the
effectiveness of ICT tasks in engaging students, in which I learnt a variety of important
strategies which I intend to employ in my own teaching practice