Below are reflections I wrote in response to key moments of my first practicum, EDPR 3100. Since writing these initial reflections, I have reviewed them and reflected upon them further. Responses to my initial reflections can be seen below them.
Initial Reflection:
EDPR 3100 Reflection 1, October 25 2019
I met my teacher mentor (TM) the Friday before the first day of EDPR 3100. During this meeting she informed me of important things to know before coming to the classroom, including which students I should expect to be especially challenged by. My TM leads a 2/3 split class and one of the most challenging students is not only in grade 2, but he is developmentally delayed; so, he has a very difficult time fitting into the classroom. Upon meeting this student I learned that he is a wonderful kid, despite his difficulties. This became even more apparent as I spent more time with him, but as we continued to work together there were times when his frustrations boiled over and he quit doing his work. The first time this happened was during a writing exercise, and he told me that I look like a nerd. Thereafter, this student continued to repeat his statement and laugh at what he was saying, and the writing exercise was derailed. I was caught off guard by this behaviour, but rather than getting frustrated, or giving up, I recognized the student was venting his frustrations, so I let him laugh. When he was done laughing, I told him that name calling is not good behaviour and that I realized he was frustrated with the activity, but I helped him regroup, offered him Play-Doh as a reward for doing work, and then supported him through the writing exercise, which he completed quickly after the incident occurred.
I have never had to deal with an experience like this one prior to beginning EDPR 3100, but I know there will be many more like this in the future. I would not admit it in front of the student, but I thought being called a nerd by a grade 2 student was comical, and I knew that it was not an insult, but rather a device utilized by that student to protect him from anger disguised as one. This understanding allowed me to learn from the situation rather than letting it trigger an emotional response. I learned that frustrations emerge in many forms, including defiance. More importantly, I learned that this behaviour is not truly defiance; it is an indicator of a struggle the student is having on a deeper level. Although I knew of this studentās learning trouble before this situation I was unaware of how this affects him emotionally, and I expect I am still unaware of other challenges this student faces that would evoke a reaction like the one mentioned.
The lesson I learned from this experience, that defiant behaviour is often a disguise for emotional distress, will be very helpful in the future. This understanding will allow me to handle situations related to deviant students with an approach calmer than one I might take if I thought these students were simply being bad. Even when students that do not have notable learning struggles act poorly I will use the knowledge I gained from this interaction to help me think critically about the situation. I will ask myself and the student in question about their behaviour in order to learn why they are acting that way. Not only will this approach help me stay calm, I believe it will prevent the student from taking their inappropriate behaviour further, because they will know I am there to support them. I know that when I acted out when I was younger I benefited from teachersā empathy, and the respect I developed for them kept me from repeatedly behaving poorly. Perhaps the student that called me a nerd feels the same way I did when I was younger, at least subconsciously. What I know for sure is that there is a growing level of mutual respect between him and it is providing a platform we can both build on and learn from.
Responding To My Reflection:
At the time I am writing this, I am reflecting on this experience several months after I wrote the initial reflection. Nevertheless, the lessons learned from the interaction discussed above have only come to resonate more deeply with time. Since then, much of the course work and in-class discussions had were in regard to inclusivity in the classroom. Of course, this is something that is difficult to make happen and, in some instances, an entirely inclusive classroom is actually not favourable for some students. Regardless of the situation, we can support inclusion by thinking critically about why students act in ways that at first might seem deviant. If this can be done, teachers can understand their students better and we can make the efforts that are necessary to meeting students’ needs and supporting their learning. Taking this approach with every student is conducive to an extremely inclusive approach to teaching, because you when you take every student’s needs into consideration, nobody gets excluded from learning.
Initial Reflection:
EDPR 3100 Reflection 2, Nov. 8 2019
This past Wednesday I taught my second lesson of EDPR 3100. My teacher mentor steered my fellow teacher candidate and I in the direction of teaching lessons based on Adrian Gearās Reading Power. So, we looked through Gearās book for concepts that could easily be introduced to my TMās class and we decided we would teach lessons about connecting with text. My lesson introduced the students to this new concept of connecting with text and in order to make the lesson easy to comprehend I decided I did not want to push the students too far by making them read and write. So, I did a read aloud from a book about emotions and thereafter the students shared their connections with the book orally, discussing things like how the page about being sad reminded them of a time they were sad, for example. Due to the fact that students were sharing their connections via talking, and the lesson was unalike one where students sit quietly and write, there were many questions being asked nearly the entire time. I answered all the questions well aside from the following. Two students asked me at once if they could both go use the washroom and I said yes. I was not about to deny washroom access to a couple of kids who had to go. But, the other students took notice that I let two go at once and suddenly they all decided they had to use the washrooms, also. For the next several minutes nearly every student asked me if they could go to the washroom.
As soon as the requests to go to the bathrooms came flooding in I realized my mistake. I let two students use the bathroom at the same time and this lead others to believe I had zero regulations about who can use the bathroom and when, aside from the expectation that they needed to ask me first. I gave them an inch and in return they took a mile. So, I told the students if they genuinely have to use the washroom, which I could never actually know, they could but after the first two who went got back there would only be one student allowed out of the room at a time. The flow of washroom requests slowed, but many students still used the bathroom simply because I said they could. One student even asked to go twice in the span of 10 minutes. I spoke with my TM about this after class and she said that washroom access is certainly a tough thing to regulate without giving students the impression they can use it as a free pass to simply leave the room, but she also recommended something I realized I should do too late: be very careful with your words.
I plan to take my TMās advice in the future, even if that means taking a second to think about what to say before I verbalize it. This will help me avoid accidentally demonstrating that it is okay to allow behaviour that goes against my expectations. Of course, this plan of action will help in more scenarios than just the one I have written about here. I am sure many situations will occur in which I could inadvertently show students it is okay to act in a way that actually is not okay, but if I can manage to think about what kind of example I might set in those situations before I act than ones like I experienced last Wednesday are very avoidable. As for next week, when the students ask to use the washroom I will say from the start, āonly one at a timeā.
Initial Reflection:
EDPR 3100 Reflection 3, Nov. 21 2019
This past Wednesday I taught my 4th and final lesson of EDPR 3100. It was the third lesson I taught in a series of lessons teaching students connecting skills. This particular lesson was designed with the goal of instructing students how to make connections to specific parts of a text. In order to meet this goal I had the students participate in a partner sharing activity at the classroomās reading rug. Before the activity began I explicitly stated my expectations for partner sharing and during the early stages of the activity students behaved as I hoped they would. But, shortly later one student decided he could share laying down. I do not recall what my initial thoughts were when I saw this behaviour, which makes me think I either thought it would not be a big deal, as long as he shared his connections still, or I did not notice it right away. Either way, I let it happen. Soon enough, three students were laying down and one was going behind my chair occasionally where I could not see her and where she was totally disengaged from the activity, consequently disengaging her partner, too. Overall, no studentās behaviour was too out of control; nevertheless, some had deviated from the behaviour expectations I laid out only a few minutes earlier and it affected the learning environment.
Following the completion of my lesson I had an opportunity to reflect on what had happened, on my own and with my faculty mentor. It was during those reflections when I realized fully why the students were behaving in a manner differently from how I expected them to. This was because I let one instance of misbehaviour take place, and other students noticed. As students noticed the one boy was allowed to lay down they realized that actions other than those I said were acceptable were, apparently, also acceptable. So, of course, they began to bend the rules I made, because I inadvertently let them. I was fortunate enough to be working with a class that did not exploit the hole I left in my classroom management strategy, but in the future I might not be so lucky if I create a similar situation for myself. Ultimately, what I learned in the aforementioned moments was to enforce verbalized behaviour expectations; if you do not, you run the risk of weakening your position as the leader in the classroom and jeopardizing a positive learning environment.
I will take this experience and what I have learned from it into account in the future. Doing so will help me maintain my position as the person in charge in the classroom. Furthermore, keeping studentsā behaviour in line with expectations will help me maintain a positive and efficient learning environment. It is easy to lose a large percentage of instructional time to dealing with preventable behaviour challenges. Therefore, it is in the best interests of mine and the students to recognize these challenges as soon as possible and ānip them in the budā to avoid having them negatively impact studentsā engagement and overall learning. With these understandings, I realize how important it is to have strategies in my teacher tool kit useful in countering unexpected behaviour.
Responding To My Reflections:
I want to respond to the previous 2 reflections at once, because I think they are closely interrelated. Looking back on the reflections above, what stands out to me the most is the realization of how important classroom management is to creating an efficient and positive learning environment. This realization came to me before the conclusion of my first practicum, partially due to the experiences I reflected on initially, and thankfully that allowed me to be more cognizant of how I can manage a classroom more successfully. Of course, there is still much that needs to be learned about classroom management, but by the end of my first practicum I felt like I had made great advancements in developing my classroom management skills and, because of this, in my growth as a future educator. At the time I write this I have not had experience in a classroom during September, which is when the foundations for successful classroom management are built. This upcoming September, however, I will get that opportunity, and I look forward to it so I can further build the aforementioned skill set.