My CFE was at White Rock Christian Academy, an independent K-12 Christian school. It is located in South Surrey and has been in the process of implementing the IB curriculum on time for 2017. I taught Science 10 and Biology 12 classes every day and also helped out with a Kindergarten class during the afternoon. The first thing that I noticed about this school was that this was a very close-knit community due to its nature as a smaller, K-12 school. Many of the students in attendance had gone to this school for a number of years and, over that time period, had built up a significant friendship and understanding with those around them. The things that I “no longer know” stem from this key observation that I made during the first week.
I no longer know that classroom size and having an “inclusive” classroom directly result in productive learning and greater student achievement.
It runs contrary to much of the educational research I remember encountering during the winter semesters at UBC, but at WRCA I definitely observed that, despite being a very close-knit, supportive and inclusive group, the students at WRCA were not automatically the most focused or engaged learners. Instead, I saw that the close-knit nature of their group actually made it easier for them to be off-task and show disruptive behaviour, simply because they were so used to being with one another as friends and not always as collaborators in learning. We were always taught at UBC that, with fewer students in a class, the work for a teacher should theoretically be easier because it is easier to keep a smaller group of students engaged, leading to fewer classroom management problems.
This was an important thing to realize during my CFE, as I learned that you could not take the situation of a smaller classroom for granted and assume that it would be easier. Instead, running a classroom with fewer students who are very close to one another requires a completely different set of skills to running a classroom holding the maximum 30. New strategies and ideas needed to be implemented at WRCA to keep the students engaged, and ultimately I noticed more problems and difficulties in my time teaching at WRCA (with classes as small as 8 people) compared to my long practicum at Prince of Wales Secondary (where I was almost always teaching 25-30 people at once).