Finally! This week the day had finally arrived for me to begin my Observational Practicum. For the past month I have fought so hard to be patient through our online learning knowing full well that finally getting into a classroom with students would make it all worth it.
For this being my very first practicum (as well as the first time in an Elementary classroom in quite a few years) I went is as a blank slate. I had a vague idea of what I expected but I chose to not set any learning intentions for myself for the day. I made this decision for a couple of reasons:
- I had woken up way too early that day out of excitement, just to sit in my car for 30 minutes prior to the school opening its doors.
- I really just wanted the day to flow over me so that I could pick up elements that stood out.
I started off by acquainting myself with my teaching coach, he was very laid back and set me up a small desk area in the back of the room. He encouraged me to ask questions throughout the day but otherwise taught his class as he would have any other day. I really appreciated this because I was worried that if I was too involved in the classroom then I would miss the overall themes and intangible elements that the classroom would have to offer, we will have future practicums for getting involved anyways.
There was a part of the morning that had quite an impact on me, it was when the teacher was giving a lesson to his grade 5/6 class about how to do mental math using the Give and Take strategy. The teacher would write the question down on the board at the front of the room and get the children to write their answers down on their individual white boards. As they’d finish, he would walk around the room and let them know if they were correct or not, then, once everyone was done with the question he would return to the front of the room to go over how they solved the question and why the answer was correct. At one point while doing this exercise he posed a question like this:
6.29+3.71=
Now, the learning intention for this was to move the numbers around so that the question was easier (6.30+3.70=10.00), leaving the decimal alone seeing as they had not yet covered decimal places. However, when one student was asked how he answered the question he told the teacher that he had removed the decimal all together, answered the question, and the replaced the decimal back into his final answer. The teacher responded by asking the student how he knew where to put the decimal and the student immediately got frustrated. He couldn’t explain to the teacher why or how he knew where to replace the decimal, he said that it just made sense and he just knew without being able to give any reasoning behind it.
So, the teacher walked the student through how he would have known where to place the decimal, ultimately giving the student the tools necessary to be able to relate the knowledge in his brain so that he could better relate it and use those tools in the future.
I found this incident to be a profound part of my day because I was so impressed with the student’s ability to grasp the concept without being given a formal lesson as well as the fact that the teacher recognized this and spent the time to connect the student’s thinking. I feel that teaching can become so exhausting for some people that in a situation like this they would see that a student is exceeding expectations and leave it at that. However, at the school that I attended I found that none of the teachers seemed too tired, they were all so incredibly invested and motivated in their student’s learning and well-being (something I did not really expect from a Venturing school).
Overall, I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to develop relationships with educators and students around Prince George. I can’t wait for next week!