Capstone
To see the blog posts about my experiences with classroom environment during my first and second practica, click below:
Overall, both my initial and second practica provided me with phenomenal and diverse experiences around creating and maintaining classroom environment and meaningful student-teacher relationships. As a future full time classroom teacher, I believe that it will be very important for me to spend the time at the beginning of the year to get to know my students on both personal and academic levels, make an effort to incorporate regular and consistent class-wide discussions about the learning process and classroom environment, personalize the instruction based on these findings, co-construct classroom values, roles and expectations, actively teach and model what those values and expectations look like, and explore learning, reflection, and motivation with the students. Similar to Brigit, I genuinely believe those moments of making sure I spoke to at least two or three students a day about their lives outside of school made a positive impact on my rapport with the students in my first practicum, and the consistent circle dialogues in my second practicum enhanced our mutual respect for one another and created a sense of autonomy among the students. By listening to their needs, incorporating their interests, and modifying instruction for the class in both practica, I believe I successfully contributed to a positive social and emotional classroom climate to varying degrees.
Based on literature about self-regulated learning (Zumbrunn, Tadlock, & Roberts, 2011), and from my own experiences in these two practica, the importance of teaching children about their own learning process has been highlighted. Similar to my first practicum experience, I would like to spend time exploring how learning occurs, what can help or hinder the learning experience, and the diversity of learner needs in my future practice. I would like to do this by building learner profiles with the students, exploring their interests and passions, practicing mindfulness, and promoting goal setting and personal reflections which support metacognition and metamotivation. I mentioned in my philosophy of classroom environment that I believed it was important to highlight that each student’s learning journey was unique, which would reduce competitiveness and optimize the environment for taking risks, asking questions and exploring solutions. To this end, I would also like to explore the ideas of the growth and fixed mindsets with my future classes (Dweck, 2006), adding to their understanding of learning and capabilities. I read Carol Dweck’s book, Mindset post practica, and I believe that teaching students about these mindsets will give them the autonomy to choose, and hopefully become better independent self-regulated learners.
Furthermore, I believe it is extremely important to contribute to the school community in addition to the classroom community to fortify the relationships with students. In my future practice, I believe that I will either begin or contribute to clubs that my students may be interested in, participate in school events, activities, and festivities, and create a strong connection with parents (I am particularly interested in using FreshGrade to make home-school connections with parents).
The second portion of my practicum opened my eyes to the importance of allocating time to develop proactive classroom environment approaches, and provided me with many challenging experiences.
“The biggest hurdle in all of this however, is the classroom management. It is feeling rather overwhelming, and I am finding myself frustrated for not knowing what to do. It is completely exhausting, and I am really trying not to resort to punitive approaches, but it seems to be what works (I know it is a bandaid fix, and doesn’t help the students develop self-discipline in the long run, but I am only here for such a short period of time, and want to be as effective as I can within that short time frame. I am also getting a sense that there is a pressure to complete content, thereby foregoing time I would ideally spend on the development of skills and strategies that I believe to be so incredibly important. This appears to be part of the divide between theory and practice….time.” Week 5 of long practicum
The week after I had written this reflection, I began trying more reactive approaches, mainly open dialogue about specific incidences that occurred. The dialogues allowed the students to actively reflect on their behaviour and how it affected those around them, and to explore options for restitution. These strategies worked in the short term, and I believe that if they were practiced regularly in the long term would build the foundation of respect and trust between myself and the students. The dialogues still take considerable time out of the day, but hopefully in a long-term placement, the incidences would become less and less frequent.
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