Session 11 Reflection

After returning from practicum, the idea for this session was to give you a chance to discuss in small groups your experiences and to provide an opportunity for clarifying goals for future (short term) development. I am mindful that running a Thursday session means that students will probably already have had a chance to 'de-brief' in other units, and also informally. Finding a way in to making the talk meaningful and helpful is a challenge - there has already been quite a bit of talk and how do you move beyond recalling experience to learning from experience?

The kinds of issues that were raised in my four groups for aspects that students wanted to better understand/develop included these:

Simplifying concepts - how do you transform a complex biology (science) concept for a particular learner group so they can understand it?

Developing authentic assessments for senior classes - what would an example of this be? For whom would it be authentic? (e.g., teacher? students - which students?)

Managing Time flexibly - how do you be both mindful of getting through the curriculum and responding to the needs of different learner groups? What happens if one class seem to get through the work faster than another?

Transitions and Being responsive within in a class - how do you pick and then act on the 'right time' to move from one activity to the next?

Being perceptive - how do you read 'cues' from students to get a sense of their progress. How can 'marker' students be helpful?

Learning how to build productive relationships - what do student teachers do to build quickly?

Engaging students and 'hooking them in to learning' - how do you get kids engaged from the start? What happens when there is already a deeply engrained culture of not working, or a particular style of working that the students trust (e.g., chalk and talk)?

How do you close a lesson with learning? In other words, help students to recognise what they have learnt as well as what they need to know to make progress with their learning?

How do you figure out what level to pitch a lesson at?

Recognising differences between managing learning and controlling learning.


These are all fantastic questions/issues. It would be interesting to know whether any of you might have predicted in advance that these are the kinds of issues that you expected to encounter? Could you/we have prepared in advance for any of them? If so, how?
Now, afterwards, what can we/you do in order to help you move forward? To me, more experience is not the answer - not just yet anyway - more experience with ...what? A way of making sense of experience so that you can start to answer these questions for yourself in more detail?

My challenge to the group is this:
Part 1 - Look for these aspects that you want to learn about NOW as you engage with your uni learning. Is there engagement? Relationship building? How are transitions made? Are sessions pitched at your appropriate level? etc. etc.
Part 2 - ASK your lecturers explicitly: How did you work out what level of complexity to present this to us? Did you consider making it more or less difficult? I noticed you stopped this activity at a certain point - Why did you do that? What were you looking for? Why did you start the session today the way you did? etc. etc.

I'd like to say there is a prize for the first 10 people to report doing this (include my classes please!!!), but well, there isn't - except the prize will be advancing your own learning and what better prize could that be? You might even begin a great conversation about teaching and learning in your session.


Something that was interesting to me as i went to visit students in schools was the difficulty many were having in getting the kind of feedback they wanted from supervisors.Some people used a variety of strategies to help educate their supervisor to get more of what they wanted, others found that even when they did that the supervisor was still too busy, etc. That is disappointing but a reality. Part of me wonders whether, because teachers are often very busy DOING teaching that they don't spend much time TALKING teaching, so it may be difficult for them to know what to say or how to say it (apart from management type or organisational type things - eg. keep board writing neat, keep an eye on Corey, etc.). The more you can learn to use a language of teaching and learning - talking about the teaching approaches, the learning styles, the ways of recognising learner progress, the better you may be at helping yourself and others make progress in understanding teaching and learning. Does that make sense?

Can you think of anything a supervisor said or did that was particularly helpful?
One great example I heard....
*When students are working in small groups, this is a time for relationship building. Go around and talk to them, find out how they're going with the work, make contact, not just checking if they're on task.

Final point:
I was happy to hear discussion of the ideas of the assignment in the final part of the tute yesterday. Great connections between what people had learned from reading and what they had learned from talking with interviewees. This is valuable since it informs you as a teacher about some of the likely challenges you will face as a teacher in teaching particular topics. I didn't plan it to happen but i was very happy when it did, as well as the ways in which people picked up on the ideas and linked it with their own experiences.

What feedback do you want to say about the session? Was it helpful? Not helpful? What would you have changed about yesterday's (whole) session, if you were teaching it? What did it make you think about?

Bye
Welcome back.
Mandi