This week I started my CFE at an IB school in North Vancouver.  Being a Montessori trainee, it has been interesting to see the connection between the two pedagogies.

Unlike the setup of many of my TC colleagues, this CFE is completely unstructured – it is a ‘choose your own adventure’ CFE.  This is both a blessing and a challenge.

In my mind, the key piece is to be able to network quickly with staff at the school and figure out how to optimize between two factors: where can I be most useful to the school community and where can I learn the most.  It’s nice to be able to draw the balance point on that spectrum myself.

After a day of observations, I was ready to ‘do’ something.  So, I managed to line up a couple of gigs on Tuesday, assisting with Rube Goldberg machines and helping with poetry, particularly performance poetry in some intermediate classrooms.  As the week progressed, I launched a unit on 3D geometry with grade 3s, helped the ELL teacher mark end of year assessments, taught a music class to the kindergartens, sat in on a couple of team meetings, and helped with drama in a few classes.  Pretty good given the beginning of the week started with a totally blank slate.

As I’ve explored the IB approach the school takes, I’ve been interested to learn the lingo. First of all – I’m now comfortable with terms like UofI (Unit of Inquiry), the structure of how things are done and how pedagogy shifts a bit in IB.  The goal for the next two weeks is to understand how the collection and evaluation of work and reflections is done.  Reflective practice is a huge part of the program, as one of the grade 6s told me on Monday rather eloquently, and I want to be able to build this into my practice effectively wherever I end up teaching.  Learning about how the school structure and focus shifts in an IB environment and how this impacts planning and assessment is my next point of curiosity.

Next week, I launch into teaching coding to a class of grade 4s, which will be a great chance to see what they can do. While I am really enjoying the ‘guest teaching’ part of the experience, I think that the real value from the opportunity will come from getting into the rooms that I wouldn’t normally spend much time in as the classroom teacher – ELL, Library and, if I can, resource.  On this front, my goal next week is to connect more deeply with the specialists and figure out how I as a classroom teacher can collaborate with those specialists in my schools to benefit my students the most.  Spending the morning with the ELL specialist today was a great start and I’m looking to take that exploration even deeper next week.