A Lesson I Taught (Transcript)
F5: Well there's probably two lessons that stand out in my mind that were really in my opinion fantastic. I was really pleased with them. The class I was with was a Grade 6 class and I found they didn't work well together at all, there was lots of little cliques and bickering within the classroom. So I tried to use a lot of ideas that I've learned in tribes here. And the school really embraces that they have circle time. So one lesson I presented was called, was an activity called campaign manager in which students were to take another student's name out of a bag and then they were to become that student's campaign manager. And then they got a little coloured circle and they had to make a campaign pin outlining all the fantastic things about this person. So it wasn't necessarily a friend of theirs, it was just a PR. So they had to think of nice things to say about that person. So I've actually brought along the display I made of all of the PR, all the badges I displayed them in the classroom so that also reinforced positive things about the students. And I was really impressed at the end, we shared ... shared all the ideas and there was one student who'd written another student's campaign badge and I think he said the student was sporty, he found him to be really sporty. And the other student who was written about said I don't think I'm sporty. And I said well isn't that fantastic that you found something, someone else finds a quality that you don't even realise you have. So that was a really good boost for his confidence. So, and then the fact that that was also displayed within the classroom means that that's always there, they can always look back and find that positive factor about themselves that somebody else has believed.
M2: With the ... I looked specifically at the advertising. I think it's clearest in my mind. I would say that one of the objectives that I want to enable the students to be able to participate actively in the class and not ... I had two Year 8 classes and was running the same classes parallel and the diversity between the two was ... was incredible, you know, I mean as ... as we're taught on the course and as we pick up on experience, you know, each class varies. And one class was very keen and very ... very active in discussions and the group work I had them doing. Whereas the other class was a lot less so. So I was able to reflect each time on where I needed to be. I guess the one class in mind is I gave them sort of print texts of advertising, so I ...I had three laminated. I split the class into three groups. There was about 18 in each class so six in each group, and put ... gave them three ... so I had three laminated objects, sort of print text and gave them each ... each one a copy of this print text. And asked them to sort of deconstruct that advert, we'd already worked in previous classes on the sort of language and technique that advertisers use. So they had a sort of a rubric to follow and they had to sort of analyse the ad and why these techniques were used, and so forth. And then after about five minutes they'd switch each of the print around so each group would ... would have each an opportunity to reflect on each of the three. They then had to present their findings back to the whole class. And that opened into a really lively debate as to when they argued about different merits of the ad, how successful the ad was, why certain techniques were being used. So that was ... why I found the lesson was so successful was because they were so active and engaged in the class. It didn't allow for opportunities for individuals to slip out. I was conscious of the group work of more confident outspoken members of the groups to ... to dominate that situation. So I'd walk between the groups and actively try to encourage all members to participate and give them, assign them different roles and encourage them to assign each other a role. So perhaps one person would scribe, so someone not quite so confident in speaking would be more confident in sort of annotating exactly what the group came up with. Maybe one or two would have been happy to be the one discussing at the end of the exercise. So you know, that activity went really, really well and again, I think the hardest thing I had with my unit of work overall, just to step back a second, would be just the time constraints. You know, I would ... I would plan an activity to last ... I anticipated moving a lot quicker. I think that's one thing you ... that students going on to placement have this desire of perhaps over-planning and I think even with my experience I fell into that trap. And an activity like that actually ran a lot longer than I was expecting because there was great debate at the end of it between the students. Because I had then planned to give them an object and just in a very short space of time for them to come up with a print text sort of advertising whatever object I was going to provide them with, but I had to then postpone that to a later class. So I think that lesson in particular was really good and as I said, because it was clear that they'd actively engaged in the class in the subject matter. It was relevant to their lives. They were able to relate to at least two or three ads I had because they were, you know, very contemporary. So just very positive lesson which I think you know, everyone learned a lot from.
F7: I think that the best learning environment I set up and the time that it actually clicked that wow, I'm going to be a teacher was only a couple of weeks ago. I did volume and capacity with a Grade 1/2 class and I took them outside thinking it's going to be a disaster, went outside, I can't yell. But in the end I set up six stations, they measured cups with sand and water and all different objects, and they finally responded to me as a teacher. I sat them down at the end of the lesson and they could all recall what volume and capacity was and how to do it. And I think that was the best environment for them, was hands on, they were outside, they were having fun but they still learned.
F9: What I came up with the idea was of like an introducing piece. So incorporating media where the students would bring in bits and pieces from their life which were important to them and just getting them to write little bits about themselves. So what I did was, so I actually had the students creating like a little piece about their life. So what I did was I set up as an example I did one on myself and just showed them on the whiteboard. I also set up one using my niece and they kind of, I think they were quite ... they were quite interested to find out about my life and about my niece's life and I think it kind of, you know, it was like a hook which engaged them and all of a sudden they were kind of bringing in pieces, you know, the next day into class and what I did was I, with a digital camera we took photos of things and also set up little portrait sessions with the students. So it was kind of became this almost like a multimedia project. This student was quite interested in tae kwon do so he wrote about that. He's spoken about his reading. He has pigeons. His first pet. Swimming and you know, they spoke about their families and friends.
F1: My final placement at Echuca primary school, I have a dancing background so I used to be a dance teacher before I came to university. And when my mentor found out about that they were doing a theme, integrated theme on fairy tales. So at the end of the term they were having a fairy tale ball or Cinderella's ball where all the students were dressing up as a fairy tale character. The parents were coming to the school, they were watching the students perform and parade and then we were all having lunch afterwards. So it was my responsibility to organise the royal dance. And that consisted of not just the Grade I was working with of 1/2s but the Grade 1/2s of Echuca primary school. So there was 125 students, myself, and the teachers, the five staff. And I lead the whole thing. So it really linked in well with the teacher as leader class that we did I fourth year because I ... I got an idea of how to ... how to lead within a school and particularly with teachers who have a lot more experience than me, it can be quite intimidating. So I put all the music together, choreographed the dance, organised the rehearsals, emailed teachers out choreography notes. They would approach me if they had any problems with it. And it was the best experience and the students were a little apprehensive at first because it was a boy-girl pair up and that never works well with young students. But by the end of it they ... they loved it and I got so much great feedback from the students, from the teachers and also from the parents. So it was ... it was great, great experience.
F2: Generally what they do is they set goals for individual children and they would then assess those, how those goals were going based on the activities that the children are involved in and they would ... they would have sort of focus. Children generally a lot of the goals for children are, at kindergarten age, are social goals. Although there are, you know, cognitive and language and that sort of thing, but those sorts of things can all be assessed within what you're doing. So you can ... you can assess how a child understands, can relate a picture to a ... to a three dimensional building, you can assess what their language is like just by sitting there talking to them, you can assess how else they can relate that information, how else they can represent it. So you might have children who then do paintings or make cardboard constructions and those other sorts of things, how they might even go home and talk about it at home and come back with different information so they're relating what happens at kindergarten to what happens at home so it's not a formal type of assessment, like it is at school and that's one of the things I'm struggling with now, being in a school, that in a prep grade that very formal type of assessment that you then have to come in with so quickly after being at kindergarten where it ... it's not a formal assessment. I know some places use checklists and that sort of thing, can cut with scissors, can ... you say certain sounds at certain ages, those sorts of things. But generally the assessment was ... would have been related to ... just to the individual goals which were set once every fortnight and would have just ... would have sometimes been things that the teacher had thought, right, this child really needs to work on ... you know if it was a social goal, if that child was a little bit ... was finding it difficult to fit in with other children socially, then you could incorporate other children into that child's work. If it was a cognitive goal you could easily fit that in to how the child understands what you're talking about, language, the whole thing. Anything is just ... is assessable.
F4: I've got two lessons from this placement that went really well. And one of the lessons I've used before. One of them is a number line that was suggested to us in our maths course. And initially the number line lesson was more as an introduction to the maths block. So it was only meant to take a short amount of time but the students were so engaged that my ... my mentor said just keep going, you know. And so I expanded that whole lesson to cover a whole block. And what we did is we had a ... a string and some pegs, just some ordinary clothes pegs, and I typed up a range of numbers. So what the students had to do was, you know, incorporate approximation, sequencing and ordering and every student wanted to have a go, each and ... we initially had about half a dozen numbers and I typed up about a dozen, and then I ended up just, you know, writing out a few more. But every student got an opportunity to get up there and you know, peg their number where they thought it belonged. They got the opportunity to change it in relation to where the other students had put their numbers and what we also encouraged is for them to verbalise their mental strategy. So as they were up there, standing up there putting up their numbers, pegging up their numbers, they were asked to talk out their thinking which gave us an idea of where they were coming from and also gave the other students in the class multiple ways of tackling that problem or tackling those issues. I have used it in another year level in another school and I used that for a history lesson. So we were sequencing history events, dates, on a timeline and that worked just as well. Everybody wanted to have a go and it was integrating both history and maths. So again using the different concepts of approximation and ordering and sequencing So that, it worked well twice so it's a very successful strategy to use. There was just one lesson that went really well. And it was the very ... it was a very simple lesson with a key objective but it turned out that the actual outcome was measurable in comparison to some of the other lessons that we'd done on adjectives. And what I'd done is I'd clipped out four pictures out of a magazine or a catalogue and they had limited words on them at the time. And then I picked four groups on mixed ability levels. I chose a team leader for each of the groups. And the groups were quite equally balanced on the ability levels so you had a good ... you had a team leader and you had people who were prepared to help one another and cooperate. So that worked out well. And then they were given this picture and they had to use describing words to ... adjectives to describe what the picture looks like, what it feels like, what it sounds like, what it smells like and how you would feel if you were in that setting. So they ... they had time to do that and that ... the teams worked exceptionally well. I was ... I was so pleased with that. Then what we did is I went around and picked up all these pictures and stuck them on the whiteboard and asked a team member one at a time to read their adjectives, to read their describing words. And the rest of the class had to guess which picture they were talking about. So compared to what had been done previously in their writing with adjectives, the number of words that they had just basically outnumbered the work they'd done before. So that was a great outcome. And they ... they worked well together, there was very little disruption in ... in the teams and at the end we turned it into a fun game, so I found that to be a very successful lesson.