As a teacher candidate, I have learned immensely from both learning about theories and practices at UBC to applying that newfound knowledge in my practicum school. If there is one thing that I am quickly learning, it is that time is rarely on your side as a teacher. Today was one of those days. I planned to give my class some motivation to help them gain some self-confidence before they started on their Journals. When I had arrived to the school in the morning, I was energized and excited to give the class a motivational speech. However, as I was carrying out my lesson, I noticed that the students were getting restless after sitting for over twenty five minutes, as my read-aloud went longer than anticipated. There were some things that I had not initially planned, which put me behind schedule in my lesson. I knew that I wanted to give the students enough time to finish their journal writing and practice their spelling words on the iPads, thus I came to the quick decision that the motivational speech had to wait for another day. I was disappointed that I could not get to the motivational speech, but I realized that I had to be flexible and that there were other things that needed to get done. This event made me understand that as a teacher, you could have planned the best lesson ever, but if something pops up or if something unexpected happens during the lesson, chances are, you are going to have to adjust your “perfect” lesson plan. It has been emphasized within my classes at UBC that being flexible is key to being an effective teacher. Now that I have experienced what it feels like to be tight on time and to have unexpected things happen, I finally understand that point now.

Even though I did not have the chance to give motivation to the entire class, I did spend some time to motivate individual students who were struggling with their writing. I motivated and tried to improve their self-confidence by saying that I believed in them or that I wanted to see them give their best effort in spelling a word. As part of my inquiry question, one of my goals is to improve the self-confidence of my students so that they do not feel defeated when approached with a difficult task. As a class, we are still making some slow progress in that aspect. Over the coming months, and definitely into my long practicum, I want to do various activities with the students in order to help increase their self-confidence in their skills and abilities. In the future, I will create a chart with the class that promotes positive messages. For example, instead of saying, “I can’t”, they can say, “I will keep trying!” I hope that I can then display this chart at the front of the class, which the students can refer to when they feeling frustrated with their work.