Learning Outcome 9
I was with the class that was in a portable, portable meaning a building that is not connected to the main school building. Here I faced two main challenges.
First, as I noted in a few of my Learning Outcomes reflections, I taught students who were in grade 4 and grade 5. This was a challenge because in my case, for subjects like Social Science or Science, I was teaching two different levels at the same time. I have had the same difficulty teaching Math. First stepping into this school and delivering some math lessons here, I found out that the students of each grade had varied levels of math knowledge. I mean, I had been taught in my teacher ed classes that math lessons should be conceptual and not rote, but to implement that was a completely different story with the variety of grades I had. There were too many mitigating circumstances when attempting to construct effective lessons generated from school-level math theories.
The other was also inherent in the design of the portable classroom. I quickly learned you could not get the rhythm of the class back after their attention had been broken. Since in a portable classroom, students leave the class and walk over to the main building just for using the washroom, and only a few can go at a time. If only one or two students walked out in the middle of class, it was incredibly disruptive to the learning environment. This structural factor also rendered it difficult to include interesting hooks, or some attention grabbing events that our coursework frequently recommends to prompt interest at the start of lessons.
Therefore, when I planned for the very first lesson for my class, I tended to follow a "banking model" of depositing information and attempting to build for understanding over time. Now that I look back now, I’m not exactly sure that THIS was the right approach. My mentor teacher was so wonderfully flexible and responsive, and I sometimes wonder if I should have taken on a more flexible and reflective approach also. I think I have a lot of growing left to do in this department and maybe these are some of the things that will make me a better teacher.
Try to fix as visual and more "critical thinking" based task
