I am back! And I did it!! I finished my 3-week Experiential Practicum and I am finally actually beginning to feel like a teacher. There is so much that I feel like I can share, from learning how to turn a hypothetical lesson plan into a real lesson with real students, all the way to behaviour management (the good, the less good, and the not good). Throughout these 3 weeks I have experienced highs and lows, going from pride to heartache all within the same day. I feel as though in just these 3 weeks I have developed long term relationships with both students and faculty within the school, which is something that I will never forget and will always use as a reminder to myself when times get tough.
Now that I am done this Experiential Practicum, I have come out the other end feeling very proud of myself. I feel like I went into it as a student and have come out a teacher. I have many moments of pride that I could reflect upon from this practicum, but I think that the moment I will cherish most is one that occurred after doing a story time and discussion with a Kindergarten class. It was one of my first lessons and I read them a short story about a cow who woke up one morning finding that instead of mooing, she clucked! The story followed the cow as she spoke with other animals on the farm and searched for her ‘moo’. I prefaced the story with the students by getting them to look for hints within the story as to who has the cow’s moo, and then afterwards we had a discussion about if their inferences were accurate as well as why the cow’s moo, or language, was so important to her. Ultimately the story time left me with a sense of happiness and pride because the students were engaged and actively participated to the conversation, as well as the fact that they gained a sense of the importance of language. Afterwards, their classroom teacher approached me and told me something that I hope I never forget. She said to me, “Miss. Morey, I want to tell you that the way that you engage with the students is fantastic. You have an absolutely amazing way of connecting with the kids and I can tell that it just comes naturally to you. I need to tell you this, and I need you to really listen, because it does not come naturally to everybody and it is important that you remember this because when times get tough later in your career, you can look back on this and remember that you. are. a. natural.”. So since the beginning on practicum I have decided that my strength as an educator is connection. I immediately cared so much for all of the students that I interacted with and I did whatever I could to ensure that they felt included, capable, and seen. That teacher was right, it does come naturally, and that is something I need to remember and hold on to.
While I did really well at connecting with the students that I taught (which were a lot since I was in the Library Learning Commons, approximately 150 students/week), there were certain elements of my teaching that I actively felt like I needed to work on perfecting. Because while connecting with the students has its own benefits to their learning, without proper time management and an easy teaching flow their learning might suffer in other ways. So, after my first few lessons I noticed that once I was up in front of all the students, my teaching method was rather choppy. It was as though I was jumping from Point C, to A, back to C, then covering B. And even though I had everything ordered nicely in my lesson plan, I wanted to adapt my teaching to the classroom as the lesson went on so I did not force myself to do anything that did not feel right. Therefore I was stuck between covering all of the information thoroughly and teaching it in such a way that worked best for that particular class on that particular day. I think I could continue to get better at an easy teaching flow through more practice and as well as working with one class more consistently. When I am in a position to work with one class for a longer period of time in future practicums, I think that as I get to know the students more, it will be easier to structure my lessons in a way that teaches them what they need to know AND in a way that is most effective for them.
Another element to my teaching that I would like to work more on are my time management skills. I think that this stems from the fact that being in the Library Learning Commons I only had about 15 minutes per lesson, and while that is enough time for some classes, I did find myself yearning for the ability to be able to go more in depth with some of my teaching. Given that the time was so restricted for each lesson, I had to keep their learning fairly superficial, and I did not have the opportunity to build background knowledge and therefore had to work with what they already knew. For some classes, I found myself teaching a rather in-depth lesson in a shorter amount of time simply because I was so eager to teach them something new and useful, but then in those instances I found that the entire lesson was crunched.
There are certainly a few more elements to teaching that I would like to practice during my next practicum, the time management and lesson flow as well as assessment, in-depth and connected lessons, and teaching in subjects other than English Language Arts. These are all elements that I am excited to try but have not yet had the chance to experiment with! I am curious to know if I will be able to maintain my ability to connect with my students while expanding my own learning into these fields that will be newer to me so that I can grow off of what I already have.
Overall, I am very excited to see where future practicums take me and cannot wait for the opportunity to apply the rest of my knowledge that I have gained throughout the course of this program. Here’s to 2 down, 2 to go!
