Throughout my first placement I have had several ‘aha’ moments, however, the one that resonates the most in my mind is the understanding that there is no such thing as being over-prepared. I have learned that plans can change from moment to moment within a classroom or school. During my time in my first placement, there was an unexpected death in a staff member’s family. On this day, being over-prepared for our students served us well as the lunch time we might use for prep was used as time for a staff meeting. We were then able to continue with the students through the tough time in the school. It is also always important to know that plans will not work for every student. For example, in my class the majority of students worked at the same pace, yet there were two to three very hard workers who would always accomplish the work faster than I had planned for. This made it important for me to plan extra work or extension activities for these students to work on while the rest of the class completed the work. As a result I have learned that as a teacher you must always look forward and expect the unexpected when planning.
The greatest risk I took in this placement was taking on math as the majority of my teaching. I started teaching math in the third week of my placement. This allowed me to plan and execute a full unit on Number Sense and Numeration for the students. I was quite nervous in taking on this responsibility as math has never been one of my strong subjects or one that I was very confident in. This was definitely the part of my placement I was dreading, but was able to work through it with lots of preparation. My first math lesson went off without a hitch. The students were engaged, they were responding exactly how I had predicted, and the timing of the parts of the lesson were perfect. I received some great feedback from my AT and was feeling much more confident. My second math lesson, however, was not the same story. Students struggled to understand the activity we were doing, and the results were far from what I had expected. With the support of my AT I chose to revisit the whole lesson the following day in an attempt to save the learning goals and to reach student clarification and understanding. While my first day was the day that made me feel competent, it was my second and third day that taught me the most. They taught me that no teacher is perfect, you can’t plan for everything, and not every lesson will be a success. I also learned that it is not the fact that you had an unsuccessful lesson that matters, it’s how you deal with it and rectify the situation. |
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