Yesterday was my last day at our second school placement for our Observational Practicum. I was placed in a grade 6/7 split class for the day with such an amazing teacher who took the time to teach me as she taught her class. She provided me with many resources as well as insight on how to create a productive autonomy amongst her students on a daily basis. She also explained to me about how the “flow” of her class is of upmost importance to her; this “flow”, as she explained it, is the motivation and energy of her class at any given point of the day. She explained to me that if the class schedule for the day depicts that one lesson is supposed to end to make room for another but the students are still on task and motivated on the lesson at hand, she simply chooses to not interrupt their learning and will make room for the other lesson on another day or time. This was very interesting to see because it was evident that the students were able to completely understand the learning at hand as well as put it into practice all in one shot. I think that this is important because by disrupting a students’ train of thought to switch to another lesson they may lose their “flow” of motivation.
For the first hour of the day the students are given the choice of attending band or fine arts class. In band, the students are forming their performance for the Christmas concert and seemed to have full autonomy on how it would be structured. I was interested to find out that for the students who are unable to purchase their own instruments the school would provide one for them to use temporarily. I also found it interesting that each student got to choose which instrument they wanted to play, this gave me the impression that the learning was for the sole purpose of education for the student rather than to put on a ‘perfect’ performance. For the students who attended the fine arts class, they were loosely led into a project but from there were able to choose where they wanted to go with it. It was really interesting to see how the students used the creative freedom. They told me about how last week they were able to write and film a short movie from beginning to end throughout the duration of the class.
The teacher that I was with this week prefers to use a project-based learning structure throughout the course of the year. It begins with a starting resource, usually something used in a humanities subject such as a book or history lesson, and will morph into a large project that will take them a couple of months to complete. Throughout the project the teacher will implement elements of other learning subjects so that by the end of the project the students have learned elements from their curriculum without having to do a lot, if any, small assignments. Their final projects reflect all elements of the learning from the past several months which allows the students to assess themselves on their learning of all the material. I really liked this method of teaching because it allows the students to have creative freedom, to collaborate with their peers, as well as apply real life experience to their learning which would ultimately increase retention.
Overall, I highly value the time that I had at this last school. I learned a lot and gathered many resources that will aid me in my future career as a teacher.