School Prac Visit 5

6th May 2010

This week I had organised with my colleague teacher to attend my observation practical on a Thursday. Since the teaching schedule is fixed for each day of the week we decided it would be a good idea for me to try and attend school practicals on days other than a Wednesday to get an all-rounded experience for each Key Learning Area. I am grateful that I was able to organise additional visits to my school for each day of the week so I can settle in to my ES1 classroom (and hence the school’s) schedule with ease once our intense 3 week practical block begins. There’s nothing like jumping into the deep end and at this point, I am not prepared to test the waters at a time where I feel we should at least be able to float if not swim. In light humour, the only concern I want to deal with is how I am going to tie up my students’ shoelaces as my pregnancy draws to an end.

Thursday begin with 15 minutes of morning prayers followed by English, news and phonics (1/2 hour lesson); Jewish Studies (1 hour); Recess at 11am (15 minutes); Mathematics (1 hour); lunch at 12.45pm (55 minutes); and H.S.I.E (1 hour). Class is dismissed at 3.10pm
I began my day by following Miss G. to English (reading and writing). Miss G. is an assistant teacher that tutors select students requiring additional help with their literacy skills. At least 3 times per week, my colleague teacher sends her weaker students to Miss G. where she spends time teaching them reading and writing skills. This ensures these students get the attention they need to improve as well as identifying exact problem areas so they can be quickly and adequately addressed. It also means that these students are able to keep up with the rest of the class where possible and that the rest of the class is not falling behind in their English content because the teacher is busy trying to keep the students requiring additional assistance up to speed. During the lesson, I note Miss G.’s questioning and responding. In her introduction, she showed her students pictographs drawn on the whiteboard and asked them to explain what these images meant. She continued to reinforce their meaning by asking the students to demonstrate the five L’s of classroom management: Look, Listen, Lips (sshh whilst teacher or a student answering a question is talking), (hands in) Lap and Legs (facing forward). This was followed by a picture of a hand raised straight in the air to demonstrate that this is what students must do when wanting to answer a question. Upon observing this, I remembered Barry, K. and King, L.’s (1998) ‘procedure for responding’. I also observed that when a student called out an answer without raising their hand she either ignored the call-out or responded with, “Oh dear. It seems you forgot our rules so unfortunately I can’t accept your answer”. When asking questions, Miss G. also adopted many of the suggestions put forward by Barry and King (1998):

· Asking questions in an encouraging manner – Miss G. was enthusiastic , warm and friendly which encouraged students to feel comfortable with her yet maintain a certain level of respect
· Questioning was direct – Miss G. directed her questions to the entire group and paused before choosing a student with their hand raised to respond
T: “I wonder what sound these letters make. Can anyone tell me?”
(pause)
T: “Yes, Joshua”
· Incorrectly answered questions were redirected but in a positive manner or redirected to encourage multiple answers by students for a single question.
T: “Are you sure this is the sound these letters make, Joshua?”
“What other sounds can we think of?”
· Questions were not directed to specific students but fairly distributed between the group
· I did not observe any rhetorical questioning.

All in all, I found Miss G.’s questioning and responding style quite effective and I will surely be adopting some of her techniques to incorporate into my own teaching style.
Following morning recess it was straight into Mathematics and group work activities. I would like to focus a little on group work here as it has been a main style of teaching and learning in my ES1 classroom. Though a little different to the group structure proposed by Whitton, D. et al (2010) whereby students are grouped in a team-style structure and work together towards achieving a common goal, ES1 is divided into groups but complete the same activities individually. The content and structure of the maths lesson was quite interesting and focused on ‘Position’. My colleague teacher introduced the concept of position by standing in the middle of the classroom and asking various students to either stand or sit in a position near her. That is, either to the left, right, in front, behind her, and so on. Students were then instructed to join their groups and each group was directed to a work station. The work stations were as follows:

(1) Drawing a robot with square tiles only. The position of the tiles will determine what the robot will look like.
(2) Cut and paste activity. Students were required to cut out objects and paste them in certain positions within an illustrated landscape. A bus on the road, for example.
(3) Computer activities: Maths Made Easy 1
(4) Counting down by rolling the dice and taking away counters corresponding to the number on the dice. This activity aimed at teaching students to subtract and was taught in a previous lesson.

The groups formed were mainly eclectic though the students with learning difficulties were grouped together. The groups were permanent, comprised of 5 students and given names of Australian Native Animals. In supervising group activities, I noted that most students worked well within their groups however, the group with learning difficulties proved a challenge to manage as they were disruptive and did not pay attention. I found it quite difficult on most occasions to ensure the work required was completed within the short time-frame allocated. Though the students worked individually within their groups, they were able to work harmoniously on most occasions and developed interpersonal skills between each other so that they were able to enforce a common discipline amongst themselves to earn points for their team.
The afternoon ended with H.S.I.E and an interactive class activity on the smartboard – a truly effective use of an instructional resource! Students were initially introduced to homes and materials used to build homes through shared reading of a big book. The lesson developed and ended with interactive activities on the smartboard: building a house and identifying homes belonging to various animals and insects. Refer to website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/education/wwww/homes/kids/index_choice.shtml

It was clear that students thoroughly enjoyed the lesson through their eagerness to participate and answer questions. ICT has surely come a long way. It will be a challenge trying to keep up with new and improved technology.

References:
Whitton, D., Barker, K., Nosworthy, M., Sinclair, C. & Nanlohy, P. (2010). Chapter 15: Grouping. In Effective Teaching and Professional Practice Handbook, (pp151-154). Australian Catholic University Ltd, North Sydney.

Barry, K. & King, L. (1998). Developing instructional skills. In Effective Teaching and Professional Practice Handbook, (pp160-171). Australian Catholic University Ltd, North Sydney.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/education/wwww/homes/kids/index_choice.shtml

School Prac Visit 4

28^th April 2010

Today’s blog will focus on reading and writing- the typical program on a Wednesday- and the instructional resources used to deliver an effective teaching lesson in English. My colleague teacher excitedly informed me that today would be kindergarten’s first shared/guided reading lesson. The lesson would focus on The Gingerbread Kid by Paul Galdone and the letter of the week, ‘O’. Every Monday, students are introduced to a new letter through a short chant or rhyme that can be referenced back to the short story.

The day would unfold with shared reading of the book, writing and constructing sentences with the letter, O and an afternoon of reading and writing activities amongst a few other lessons. One of the activities included cutting out a series of illustrations (not necessarily in order) taken directly from the book and rearranged in order to coincide with the events from the story. Students were required to retell their favourite part or even the whole story.

The resources used in the various activities were predominantly visual:

• Smartboard – for teacher demonstration on writing the letter, O and sentences containing this letter
• Storybook – The Gingerbread Boy by Paul Galdone
• Worksheets – required for tracing and writing the letter, O and other sentences to build writing skills of students through practice
• Word cylinder models – used in constructing word sentences
• Illustrations worksheet – for retelling of the story, The Gingerbread Boy
• Workbooks – for further practice of writing skills
• Flash cards – connecting and recalling words in a game called Word Bingo

Audio-visual resources were only of a single type:

- Computer – interactive reading program

As in Barry and King’s (1998) Developing instructional skills in Beginning Teaching and Beyond (3^rd ed.), I did find the resources used helped students to learn more effectively by:

- Reinforcing, integrating, and extending classroom instruction (worksheets, word cylinder models, writing workbooks, computer aided interactive reading program)

- Helping in the recall of information (illustrations worksheet, flashcards)

- Helping to gain and maintain interest in a lesson – I believe this to be so because the activities were of only a 20 minute duration and were conducted in a rotational format

- Making learning more meaningful by providing an organized structure that gives concepts learned a concrete representation

In addition to the information resources used however, it was evident that without the support of the teacher and assistant staff to guide and provide mentoring during the activities or to provide instruction in how to use the resources the information resources on their own would not have been sufficient enough to deliver a purposeful learning experience. Within my group, I observed that offering praise for good work and for trying to do well, motivated students more than the activity itself. Also, supervision was absolutely necessary to ensure students were actually completing the tasks at each work station correctly and in an efficient and safe manner. For and early stage 1 class however, it probably shouldn’t be expected that students are able to work independently for extended periods of time due to their short attention spans and mischievous nature.

Barry, K. & King, L. (1998). Developing instructional skills. In Effective teaching and Professional Practice Handbook (pp160-171). Australian Catholic University Ltd, North Sydney.

School Prac Visit 3

23^rd April 2010

I thought I would dedicate this reflection to my teaching lesson. Today, I was to deliver a 1 hour mathematics lesson to my ES1 students. The topic: ‘Thick and Thin’. I won’t go into details of what I taught in the lesson to achieve the lesson outcome as the feedback from my colleague teacher was that the lesson activities and resources I provided were excellent. What I would like to discuss however, is the overall frustration and slight shock that I felt in managing a classroom of 30 kindergarten students. In the back of my mind I was always aware that classroom management would be somewhat of a challenge however, in my experience on this day I felt like I had walked directly into a scene from Kindergarten Cop! Unfortunately, managing smaller groups of students during rotational activities at a specific work station is nothing like standing up in front of a classroom and managing these same students collectively during a lesson.

As my colleague teacher graciously put it I needed to, “work on my classroom management skills and timing”. Had I stepped into her shoes however, I probably would have been more forthright in delivering my criticisms.

The lesson began quite well with the first activity. Students were to use playdough at their desks to make a thin and a thick snake. This activity was relatively simple but I underestimated the time that my students would take to complete this task, most probably due to my lack of experience of dealing with the very short and virtually non-existent attention spans of these 5 year olds. The students finished the activity relatively quickly which meant they became bored and started to become restless and cause distractions. At times my lack of voice projection also meant that students were unable to hear me properly and therefore lost their focus for the rest of the lesson. This didn’t seem to be a problem with the girls as they were in fact all very well behaved but the boys adopted attention-seeking behaviour and resorted to yelling out answers without raising their hand, one male student yelled out irrelevant answers; touching equipment when told not to and at one stage the boys broke out into a chant of ‘thick-thin…’. One of the most difficult things was remembering all the student names. This meant that it was also difficult to draw on the attention of some disruptive students when I tried to enforce discipline. Tactics I employed at the time included:

- stopping the lesson until I had regained their attention. This worked initially but did not thereafter. Probably a bad idea. I don’t think ‘waiting’ for any kindergarten student achieves anything.

- raising my arms in the air and twinkling my fingers followed by clapping rhythmically. This technique worked quite well when used by my colleague teacher however, did not work as well with some students when I tried it. One student did not follow the pattern of the beat and would purposely adopt his own clapping pace.

- Giving a warning and enforcing consequences if a student didn’t stop the disruptive behaviour on a count of three. This seemed to work but was not enough.

All in all I was very disappointed with the outcome of the lesson as it had the potential to provide a wonderful learning experience for the students that did want to learn. I was however, grateful for the experience as it gave me a realistic idea of the things that needed to be addressed both for myself as an educator and for the students in the classroom. There are many things I feel I could have done differently. Perhaps not emphasizing poor behaviour as much and instead focusing on good student behaviour; implementing praise and encouragement and describing why the student behaviour is valued; finally, familiarizing myself with student profiles. That is, a few students have a certain history of familial problems or are developmentally delayed. Had I been aware of this information, I may have adequately prepared myself with management strategies to address behavioural issues from these students. One thing I did conclude from this experience however is that students appear to demonstrate a certain kind of implicit respect for their classroom teacher as opposed to a casual or student teacher. I hope I can prove myself wrong on this point. I guess I will find out when I conduct my next lesson on 28^th May.

Following my lesson, I took notes of the strategies used by my colleague teacher to manage behaviour in the classroom. These are listed as follows:

- approach student. Deliver long, wide-eyed and stern stare

- stern, assertive, clear, loud voice to deliver disciplinary verbal cue

- maintain student attention during lesson by delivering short, quick instructions; use lots of facial expression, an expressive voice and hand actions when describing things

- where necessary, come down to student level to deliver verbal disciplinary cue

- students that call out without raising their hand are excluded. Student told to stand up and move away from the group. They are told that they are no longer a part of the lesson.

- students that raise their hands to discuss other things that divert from the question at hand get the teacher response: “That was not the question and you’re not answering it”. Teacher quickly moves on to the next student.

- students that raise their hands without having an answer ready first get the following teacher response: “Do not put up your hand unless you have an answer ready!”

- the teacher demonstrated that even with her back turned to the class, she was continually listening for distractions and addressing them promptly

- verbal praise was given (and a gold star to add to student Star Book) with the teacher describing the good behaviour demonstrated by the student: “Good. You were listening to instructions”; “X gets a gold star because he was minding his own business and didn’t turn around like everyone else when Y was being disruptive”

- during group activities, expedite teacher roaming and assessing progress of student work meant there was no time for students to slack off or cause trouble

- student attention was gained by rhythmic clapping above head

- the 5 L’s: Look, Listen, Lips (quiet), Lap (hands folded), Legs (forward)

- praise of groups as well as individuals. Group praise resulted in table points.

- Hands that were raised in the middle of a lesson without a question asked by the teacher were ignored or waved down.

Helpful resources include:

Edwards, C., & Watts, V. (2004). Discipline Problems and Their Causes. In Effective Teaching and Professional Practice handbook, (pp173-180). Australian Catholic University Ltd, North Sydney.

Konza, D., Grainger, J. & Bradshaw, K. (2004). Existing Models of Behaviour Management. In Effective Teaching and Professional Practice Handbook, (181-192). Australian Catholic University Ltd, North Sydney.

I found the various models of behaviour management quite informative in their content. It is useful to extrapolate points from these models and apply the strategies offered in the appropriate context.

websites:

http://www.behaviour.com.au/hcentre.htm

http://www.proteacher.org/c/507_Attention_Signals__Quiet_Signals.html

http://www.learningplace.com.au/deliver/content.asp?pid=2010

http://712educators.about.com/od/discipline/a/student_conduct.htm

Finally, practice, practice, practice! And seek advice where necessary.