Thoughts on my Placement


During my first block teaching, I taught two grade 11 physics courses, one of which was enhanced with 15 students, and the other had 24 students.  Although I was teaching the same lessons in both classes, I found that the class dynamics were extremely different. 
I found that my first week teaching the enhanced class was challenging because the students did not regard me as having expert knowledge in the subject.  However, once I began getting to know the students and asking them questions unrelated to the lessons being taught, they began to warm up to me.  For example, during the lesson I would take breaks to ask individual students about events they were part of.  I.e. a couple students had a math contest, so I discussed that with them.  During my placement, I found out that many of the enhanced students were in the schools band, so I purchased a ticket to see them preform at music night.  The next day during my lesson, I mentioned how good the students were during their performance, and I found that they responded extremely positively to my comments.  I think that my biggest struggle for this class was keeping them engaged and on-task seeing as they were able to grasp concepts at a quick rate, and therefore did not find the course content challenging enough.  During my last couple weeks, I decided to bring more complex problems for the students to try working on after teaching them the lessons.  I found this worked quit well because the students were discussing the challenging problems rather than having conversations unrelated to physics.  For example, during the circuit analysis lesson, I brought in some questions that one would expect to see in a university course, and I was pleasantly surprised to find half the class sitting together trying to solve the circuits total resistance for the remainder of the period.
With the other grade 11 physics class, I found my biggest challenge was class management and being assertive.  For the first week the students were behaving well in the class, however, as the weeks went on I noticed 2 or 3 students starting to test me and see how much they could get away with.  At first, I was unsure of what the appropriate actions would be when dealing with these students.  However, I quickly learned that by constantly checking in with them and making sure they copy the notes, they had fewer opportunities to talk and participate in off task behaviour.  Although this is still a topic that I need improving on, I have learned a lot of tips for how to deal with off-task behaviour and students trying to test me.  I found that proximity really helped with these students, and that sometimes by ignoring their behaviour, they would eventually settle down. 
During the first couple days of teaching, I taught in a lecture style, however with the feedback and help of my associate teacher I learned that for students in high school, I need to slow down the pace and explain concepts in a clearer way.  I feel like this is something I have improved on throughout my 4 weeks of teaching.   

Overall, I think I have learned a lot during my placement, and have started to develop my own teacher identity.  I have also learned a lot of tips from my associate teacher, such as how to efficiently score and record marks, as well as how to teacher certain topics in such a way that it makes sense to the students.

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