Category Archives: Community Field Experience

CFE Musings 2 – On being a chameleon

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Madagascar Chameleon – By Jean-Louis Vandevivère (originally posted to Flickr as cameleon madagascar) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Week 2 at my CFE in an IB school was a worthwhile experience.  It has been interesting to see how beginning with the question ‘what can I do to be useful’ has led me to being defined by the teachers at the school.  How so?  Well, I came in and found the grade 6 classes preparing for a play and a musical.  So I offered to help prep them.

It was a great chance to teach drama, which I hadn’t done in a deep way in my practicum.  I’ve spent enough time in high school drama classes, performing in musicals, choral concerts and doing public speaking that I could quickly and easy reflect those experiences to the kids and coach them on finding their voices.  It was a great way to be useful to the kids and support the life of the school.  As I helped students with their blocking, projection, emphasis, characters, backstage management, etc., I found I soon became known as someone who was particularly experienced as a drama teacher.  I’m flattered, but until now, I hadn’t even thought of including this on my resume as an area of strength.

To me, that is the magic of teaching elementary school and the reason I am so glad to come to teaching with a varied set of experiences.  As elementary teachers, we need to move from being able to support a school play, to teaching kids to be numerate and literate, to exploring science, to making meaning out of current events and history, to helping to explore visual arts.  All the while while building student buy-in for the idea that building the community up is the preferably path to getting a cheap laugh by tearing the community down.

And so, to me, good teachers are clearly chameleons.  They make themselves appear to be native to any subject under the sun, often simply by knowing how to formulate the right questions.

So this week, I’m the drama specialist.  Next week, who knows?  This experience has led to what is perhaps my new definition of what it means to be a great elementary teacher: A great elementary teacher is a chameleon; someone who makes it seem as though whatever they are needed for is what they are meant for.

CFE Musings – The Choose Your Own Adventure Edition

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choose your own adventure 2

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.