Professional

School ofPractice 3
Education
102095 Secondary PP3 Self Reflection Form

Pre-service Teacher Details

Pre-service Teacher Name: David Kass Pre-service Teacher ID: 18567377

Pre-service Teacher Phone Number: Pre-service Teacher Email Address:

0447 396 372 18567377@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 3. Attach
evidence.

Placement Name: Auburn Girls High Placement Phone Number: 02 9649 6949
School
Placement Address: Hunter Street, Placement Email Address:
Auburn NSW 2144 belinda.juric@det.nsw.edu.au
Contact Person: Olga Vega: olga.vega@det.nsw.edu.au

Describe in 500-800 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?
Why were you surprised about your learning?
What goals did you set for yourself in your service learning activities?
In what ways were you communicating with your community participants?
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?
How would you help someone else learn what you discovered?
Self-Reflection

Having completed my practicum at Auburn Girls High School, the skill that I feel I have developed the
most is the ability to ascertain students’ levels of understanding. The school is located in Auburn, in
Sydney’s west. In 2016, there were 801 girls enrolled at the school and the school allocated $13 615
for additional support for students with a refugee background. The students come from a wide
variety of cultural backgrounds and the majority of students come from language backgrounds other
than English (Tsoutsa, 2016). I participated in the Refugee Action Support Program, which places
pre-service teachers in schools to assist students with refugee backgrounds in a tutoring role. The
program also provided training to help with teaching students with refugee backgrounds and all
E.A.L.D.EAL/D students. The practicum was a very rewarding experience. At Auburn Girls, the
program is run after school as a Homework Centre each Thursday. My practicum consisted of
helping girls from years 7-12 with their work at the Homework Centre and attending E.A.L.D.EAL/D
classes as a teacher’s aide. The experience was so rewarding, I found myself wishing I could be there
more than once a week. Although the practicum took many weeks to complete, in terms of hours, it
was short.

A lot of the time in the Homework Centre, girls asked me to proofread their work. Although the
Homework Centre is open to all students, many of the attendees were E.A.L.D.EAL/D students,
because these girls are encouraged to attend. One young lady in particular asked me to proofread
her work often. It was clear that she spoke English as a second language but expressing her thoughts
in English was the only difficulty she appeared to be having. Although poorly expressed, her ideas
were always very sophisticated and she did good work. I feel that helping her express her ideas more
clearly was very beneficial for her and hence it was rewarding for me.

Sometimes girls asked for help with regular homework tasks, but the majority of the work I helped
students with at the Homework Centre was interpretation of the requirements of assessment tasks
and helping girls with research techniques for their assignments. In some cases this only involved
pointing the student in the right direction; in other cases, it was necessary to guide the student
through the whole process. The students often had not read the assessment criteria and had to be
reminded of the importance of this and sometimes they needed help understanding what the
assessment criteria meant. On occasion, girls would ask for help with an assignment but then it
would turn out that they didn’t have the assessment notification with them. These were the hardest
tasks to help with.

When helping as a teacher’s aide in E.A.L.D.EAL/D classes, I feel I benefited greatly from the chance
to observe the pedagogical strategies of both the classroom teachers and the E.A.L.D.EAL/D
teachers. Having completed only one practicum as the classroom teacher myself, I feel that
observation of other teachers in action is equally as beneficial for my development as a teacher as
being the classroom teacher. I often found myself taking more notes on the teacher’s practice than
the students were taking on what was actually being taught. Helping girls with their tasks in these
classes was similar to my tutoring role in the Homework Centre; mostly it was helping girls to
understand more fully what was required of them.

The children viewed me a bit differently to the classroom and E.A.L.D.EAL/D teachers, because they
knew I was not yet a fully-fledged teacher, so to speak, and it was interesting to observe the ways in
which they interacted with me differently to the other teachers, both in the classroom and in the
Homework Centre. They were more willing to confide with me that they had not yet started a task
within a given period of the date that completion was required and other such matters which they
may have felt a “real” teacher would be disappointed about. Previous research on the Refugee
Action Support Program reports this as a common experience for tutors and concludes that making
adults available with whom the refugee students feel they can confide such things as this, is a
valuable benefit of the program (Ferfolja, 2009, Ferfolja and Vickers, 2010, Naidoo, 2012, Naidoo,
2013). There was only one girl, however, who I knew had a background including refugee
experiences, though there would have been others. As I have mentioned, the Homework Centre was
open to all students but E.A.L.D.EAL/D students were encouraged to attend. In classes I was working
exclusively with E.A.L.D.EAL/D students, with which the additional training that was part of the
Refugee Action Support Program was helpful.

My practicum experience at Auburn Girls High School, though short, was a very rich experience in
professional development. I feel that as a service-learning enterprise it was successful through the
reciprocal benefits it led to. I feel my contributions as a tutor and teacher’s aide were of benefit for
the students and I in turn benefited from an overwhelming sense of fulfilment as well as the
development of my pedagogical practice.
Bibliography

Ferfolja, T., (2009) The Refugee Action Support program: developing understandings of diversity,
Teaching Education, 20:4, 395-407.

Ferfolja, T. & Vickers, M., (2010) Supporting refugee students in school education in Greater
Western Sydney, Critical Studies in Education, 51:2, 149-162.

Naidoo, L., (2012) Refugee action support: Crossing borders in preparing pre-service teachers for
literacy teaching in secondary schools in Greater Western Sydney, International Journal of
Pedagogies and Learning, 7(3): 266–274.

Naidoo, L., (2013) Refugee Action Support: an interventionist pedagogy for supporting refugee
students’ learning in Greater Western Sydney secondary schools, International Journal of Inclusive
Education, 17:5, 449-461.

Tsoutsa, Anna., (2016) Auburn Girls High School Annual Report, Sydney, New South Wales, retrieved
from: http://www.auburng-h.nsw.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/bsk-pdf-
manager/ASR_2016web_11.pdft.