As I continue on in my teaching profession I hope to continue demonstrating and practicing the importance of what it means to be a life-long learner. I honestly trust that in order to develop into an effective instructor one must continue to grow and learn even in the worst of situations.
This includes taking a look at my current ongoing questions that I have developed from this past year within the Middle Years Self-Regulated Learning cohort. Firstly I am still looking into how to properly build an effective relationship with the teaching assistant staff in an ultimate effort to build optimally appropriate and inclusive curriculum. Forming and constructing lessons that are motivating for students with individualized education plans is no easy task, especially when not properly taking advantage of the assistance of a teacher aide. In a sense my question towards this issue would be how I will better my approach with incorporating a better relationship with the school staff special educators? I feel that the obvious solution is incorporating as much communication as possible between the two parties. Discussing what is going well and what is going quite difficultly is key through the use of weekly, and possibly even daily meetings.
Another issue is my challenge of organization. Going headlong into my practicum, it soon became clear that teaching is a very fast paced and time-consuming profession. The speed at which things change and happen is quite fast and maintaining a proper classroom amidst all the chaos requires keen organization skills. For me this concerned the organization of my own students in the sense of keeping them well informed of due dates, keeping personal items from getting lost, and ultimately turning in missing work. Teachers do not need the added stress of trying to chase student down to get them to hand in work. Had I been more prepared I would have gone about things in a completely different way than my initial effort. Looking back on my experiences I now wish that I had made more use out of a visual display of what students are missing for schoolwork. Furthermore, I would make sure to establish a responsibility with the students of going and checking the homework board to see if he or she has missed work. I want to make sure in my future endeavors that I implement one of these to save myself a large amount of stress and frustration.
However, amidst all the turmoil I did notice some strengths that I personally brought to the table when teaching and interacting with my class. Specifically I really enjoyed the aspect of teacher and student interaction during my practicum. Getting to know students and interacting with them gave me a sense of who my students really were along with their likes, dislikes, and personal interests. As I stated earlier in my teaching philosophy I believe that this helps bring a sense of community within the classroom while enabling trust between the teacher and student. I hope to nurture this trait in my future by always making sure to put extra effort into greeting students, spending time in between classes interacting, and initiating classes with community enriching activities such as talk circles. I also enjoyed the reaction that I would receive when using interacting and engaging materials during lessons. My class in particular was not a group that appreciated undertaking verbal discussion activities. This presented me with a challenge to make lessons as stimulating as possible suing relevant and practical content. I hope to continue this trait in the future once again by interacting with my students and finding out what they are interested in and using it to enhance my student’s learning.
Additionally, with classroom community comes the ability to be able to read where your students are at in a developmental sense. I felt that as I progressed into the focus six weeks of teaching 80-100% during practicum I really began to get a sense of what level of abilities my students’ consisted of. This includes what kinds of learners I had in my classroom as well as what workloads they were capable of handling. I also could eventually get a sense of what ability level each student was at in terms of engaging in self-regulating strategies and learning tactics. Relating back to my question of inquiry, I hope to further this ability in finding my classroom’s equilibrium in using and implementing autonomous learning methods. Not all students can handle the same level of autonomy and need the presence of direction in order to scaffold their development. However, I believe that through the development of teacher – student relations the teacher will be able to sense the child’s level of self-regulation.
Although I do not know what my future entails I do know that I have much to learn as an impending teacher, and that these few ideas of personal development that I have previously listed may only be the first few issues that I will face during my career. I have found that teaching is a profession that provides you with new challenges each day, and in order to continue developing into the applicable educator that I wish to be will have to find new and innovative capabilities in teaching.