Welcome back! It’s been a minute but I wanted to write a (hopefully) short and sweet post about the two week placement I have just completed and the invaluable experience I had.
After my last day on placement I posted this tweet and Instagram post but I will be unpacking the nitty gritty of my experience right here.
So how was placement? As I stated in my Instagram post it was fun yet challenging. In my first year of my degree I had completed an observation placement, where I largely took notes and was a classroom helper working with students in small groups. However, this time around I was thrown in the deep end. This placement I worked with a Foundation class for two weeks and with the support of my mentor teacher and the entire Foundation teaching team, I stepped in for teaching maths and a few writing lessons in my second week of placement. The first week, I focused more on being a classroom helper and building relationships with staff and students.
The thing I probably found most challenging on placement was not only needing to know how to teach with such explicit instruction for younger students, but to also manage students behaviour. When I got to the school, I couldn’t help but notice that the teachers were being a bit strict on the students. However over the following few days, I came to realise that young children need that. One of the mentor teachers also said that when they’re at this age, they’re not going to take anything personally and they need a strict routine to learn how to be at school.
Not only that but it was tougher than I thought to actually teach lessons! I’ve always known that teaching is one of the toughest jobs in the world yet so rewarding and I am now beginning to realise what that means when you’re out there and on the job. I was nervous to teach but my mentor told me that it’s best to just dive in, fake it until you make it, be flexible and to just appreciate the mistakes you may or may not make whilst still being a student teacher. Not all lessons turned out the best, I’m going to be honest and say that some of them felt disastrous but I was glad to be given the push along with so much support from the people I worked with.
As a society that is moving to include technology in all aspects of life and as technology is improving, I noticed that ICT use in the Foundation classroom was quite limited. When I asked the teachers why this was, it wasn’t that they as a school believe technology should not be a vital tool in the classroom, but it’s that Foundation students are only just starting to get a grasp on reading.
As I said, in the tweet, it seems so obvious but never hit me until I was working on literacy with them and there was a reading activity where they did have to use those iPads. My mentor teacher told me that because of this, the principal and the rest of the teaching team agree that it’s best to sometimes use the interactive whiteboard for literacy, maths and integrated studies as a class rather than individual whilst still learning to read. Throughout my placement, the class used ICT as a whole class on the floor to watch videos and play games. In one of my lessons, I even included a measuring game as the students were learning about the basics of length- the difference between short and tall.
I said I was going to keep this short, so I’ll wrap it up. All in all, I believe I had a successful placement that really opened by eyes up to the responsibilities of teaching. I’m also glad to have built such great relationships with the staff and students, in fact they have asked me to start volunteering there if I would like more experience, which I would love to take on because I miss my students already! I cannot wait for the next teaching challenge that comes my way!
Enara Goes To School 