There are a few things that I need to continue to work on:
Instruction (I think I improved, but I could still give clearer instruction.)
Classroom management (phones! It was hard for me to be mean, but I tried. It worked! Many students do not use their phones as much now in my ESL level 3 class.)
Questioning (Refer back to Bloom’s Taxonomy! After attending the Pro-d ESL session, I have learned to include the specific vocabulary to question my students. By constantly using evaluate, assess or similar vocabulary in my questions, students will be more comfortable to answer the questions once they advance to the next level.)
Detailed lesson plan ( to identify the different types of assessment in my lesson plan and provide better intro and closure)
There are just two weeks left. I have to try my very best.

I got to attend a few teacher-parent conferences.  I just jotted down some notes about students’ strengths and weaknesses. I also prepared some students’ homework and projects in case the parents wondered what they were doing for assignments or in class.  I think I did a pretty decent preparation considering it was my first time to talk to the different parents. I learned quite a lot from my sponsor teachers. They would discuss both strengths and weaknesses of the students. They would also provide some suggestions to help the students improve, such as telling the parents about the peer-tutoring program or offering to check the student’s agenda each day to make sure they have written down the homework. It was quite interesting because I thought the parents might only want to know how their children were doing. However, no, they would also want to know if the students would do well next year. It was a fruitful night for me! Now I can a full picture of how to present a full report to the parents.

I had my last class with my grade 8s. My workload would be reduced down to 2. It was a relief because I got kind of burn out. At the same time, I could not imagine the following weeks without seeing the energetic cute grade 8 students. After I greeted them and they responded with “good morning, miss lui”, I told myself to remember this moment; it would be the last time I heard this choir-like adorable greetings. Before I asked students to provide individual feedback for me, they had a group activity to compare and contrast the book and the movie. It was interesting how much they disliked the movie. I would love to have more discussions or activities with the movie, but I just did not have much time. For example, I would love to have my students enact a scene or create a trailer as a project. In this case, they can further apply ethos, pathos and logos. They can also learn other skills, such as editing a video clip, inserting a background music into a video or adding captions. It would be so much fun. Oh well, I can leave all these ideas when I have my own class. After the group activity, they wrote down some feedback for me! 😀

Let’s review my grade 8 Humanities
I thought of Freier’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In my humanities 8 classes, I tried not to spoon feed materials to my students. I do not want to treat my students as passive objects which I can fill them with knowledge and call that teaching. I think I have taken the initiative to create a dialogue with my students to discuss the different topics that revolved around the novel. I listened to their perspectives and learned how they formed these ideas; meanwhile, they learned some information from me. This was a two-way contribution. I also thought that by asking them to provide an expectation of me before I taught them and give me some feedback after I taught them allowed me to reflect my teaching strategies. I knew which activity they liked and which lesson was the most memorable for them. A few students were mature and observant enough to tell me what I needed to work on, such as better classroom management. I appreciated all of the honest sincere comments. It was interesting how students could really feel if you enjoyed teaching or not because that was what they told me in their feedback. 🙂

Mid-point Meeting with my SAs and FA
The mid-point meeting was quite positive. I learned a lot from my sponsor teachers’ feedbacks as well as my faculty advisor’s. I will have to focus on developing my teacher-talk and building the school community outside of the classroom. Assessment will be another area that I am still figuring it out: to incorporate as, of, for learning assessment.

School Based Team Meeting
I had a school based team meeting to talk about one of my students who was apparently failing Maths and Science. I did not really know how it worked, so I was kind of excited to participate in it. Basically, every teacher that the student has classes with will go to the meeting. The counsellor began by passing out the student’s report cards to teachers, so we had an idea of how he was doing in other classes. Then, the counsellor would ask individual teachers for comments about that student. I contributed a little by describing how he behaved in my Humanities class. I did see him in another light, which was in the ESL 3 class. He would be more active and more engaged in the activities. I guess his confidence level contributes to how he behaves in class. I am not really sure how to help him to gain more confidence in Humanities.

ESL 1/2 Level Observation
My students used the new adjectives that they learned from last class to describe their hometowns and presented it. Everyone did a good job. I was impressed by how detailed and how much effort they put into preparing for their presentations. Everyone encouraged each other; it was a supportive classroom. I had fun during this class too. I learned a lot about their hometowns and where they came from. I was also surprised by the amount of first language they spoke during class. The social contracts were working or the fact that I told them about my teacher’s observation scare them! 🙂 The class went relatively well. However, in the upcoming classes, I will have to limit the access of cell phones and my usage of filler-words, such as yes.

ESL After-school program
After class, my students asked if I passed and what did my teacher say. Haha, they were so cute like that. It was so caring and nice of them to ask though. Afterwards, I prepared a few paragraphs for them to look for potential mistakes. The process was funny because there were mistakes that they could have easily caught but they missed. Then, the class taught me a fun game that could help students with their oral skills. It was similar to The Killer, but we needed to guess who were the spies based on the descriptive sentences they told. I enjoyed that game, but some of the students were bad actors and liars. It was so obvious to spot who were the spies. 😀 Great game though!

When I was teaching the grade 8s on heroism earlier this week, I did not realize I was actually on a heroic journey until now.

The BEd program is like the threshold that I have just crossed, and the different challenges I face during my practicum are the trials that a hero will face. Let me walk you through my heroic journey so far.

1. Ordinary World
2. The Call to Adventure
I always know I want to become a teacher. I know this is God’s vision for me. Therefore, I applied for the BEd program. I decided to give it a try to see if this was really what God wanted me to do. Since I got in, I guess God was leading me onto this path that He prepared for me.

3. Refuse the Call
My lovely home. My warm bed. My after-undergrad-travelling-adventure.

I was travelling around Europe before I got into the BEd program. There was a moment I just wanted to travel around as a “teacher” (since I did have my TESL certificate, which meant I could probably land myself a job somewhere). I did try to refuse the call of going back to UBC for the BEd. My mum even convinced me to just teach without the degree. 

4. Helper
My fellow classmates, my best friends in the program, have been helping me out a lot. They encourage me to stay positive when I encounter some difficulties. Also, it is nice to be around with so many people who have the passion and desire to educate and care for the teenagers. They are helping me to get through this stressful time of the year. Of course, my family and my boyfriend also help me along the way to try to cross the threshold. They told me that I would be a great teacher, and I was meant to be one.

5. Crossing the Threshold. Entering the practicum.

6. Trials
Right now I am going through different big and small challenges.
1. I thought I lost the school key after two weeks into the practicum. Luckily, I found it in my laundry bag. I have learned to be more careful.
2. I thought it was difficult to make copies. Now I think it is the easiest thing to do on Earth.
3. This poor behaviour kid in my class starts to open up to me. He even handed in his homework a day earlier than the due date.
4. The ESL kids started to hand in their homework after I gave them the adjusted assignments. They will look for help if they do not understand.
5. 4 weeks ago, I did not know how to drive to Richmond from my home. Now I know how to do so. Indeed, I am very comfortable with the idea of myself driving alone.

I am sure there are more trials I have faced/ am going to face; however, I am not afraid. I know after I go through all these different trials, I will become a new Kelly. I will have a new role which is Miss Lui. I cannot wait to have my own classroom and decorate it the way I want.

Based on the comments my FA and SA made, I think I may have to front-load my grade 8 students a lot more than I expected. This is definitely the homework I need to learn for the remaining few weeks.

1. Mock Trial
It was my first time to organize a mock trial. I was setting the mock trial up as a vehicle to get students think in the perspective of the characters. It was also a way for them to think about this question: could violence ever be justified?
I allowed my students to pick their roles, so that they would be more eager to participate. However, from this activity, I knew that it might be a better idea for me to assign their roles. There were a certain boys who could never be grouped together because if they were in the same group, there would be chaos. I really need to come up with some creative ways to group the students. It is a small class, so there are not many varieties. Seeing how the students were more comfortable when they were sitting on the floor, I really had the desire to just move all the chairs and desks away. However, I could only change the classroom setting once in a while. Anyway, let’s get back to the mock trial. I did not really provide my students a whole lot of information about the mock trial. I gave them a script to begin the trial and told them the responsibilities of their roles. I did not really prep the students on how to object or how to ask appropriate questions. And both of my SA and FA thought I could have done that, so the trial would run a lot smoother. Nonetheless, considering it as my first “trial”, I thought I did a good job. I thought the discussion went fairly well.

2. Talk Show
I had my students discussed some of the questions from chapter 10, 11 and 12 in a more interesting way. I divided them into groups, and gave them some guiding questions to help them to stay on task. The objective was to get students think about the questions and presented them in an entertaining way for their fellow classmates. I got the idea of a talk show from one of the ubc classes I had. I did not really know how to execute it when I read the brief description from the textbook. And yet, I thought it was a great idea to try it when my FA was coming in to observe. As a result, the lesson was not as fantastic as I imagined it to be. I would not say it was a total failure because some students could still accomplish the task. It was just that I did not give them clear guidance as to how I wanted the talk show to be like. Again, I did not front-load my students enough, which was the critique I got from both of my SA and FA. On my part, I could have done more research on it, so that I knew how other teachers had executed it before I tried.

That day was the first day I cried because of the BEd program. I tried very hard not to cry, but it was difficult. Tears just kept sliding across my cheek. However, I would not give up that easily. I will rebound from this to tackle the lack of front-loading problem. For the following week, I am going to front load my students as much as possible to get them prepare for writing a persuasive paper. Let’s see if I get accomplish this another trial of my teaching journey.

My third and fourth days were quite smooth.

I made a seating plan for the quieter class. I thought separating the student with behavioural issue from the boys might be a good idea because I did not want them to feed off one another. My SA pointed out that him sitting with the boys might have made the scenario on Tuesday. Therefore, I created the plan to get him to work with other students who I considered as brighter and more mature. Hopefully they would be able to influence him to be a student like them. I do have mixed feeling on this “trouble-maker”. He is not the typical bad kid who just slacks off. He is actually bright and has potential to be academically successful. I just need to find the right channel to communicate with him. The points that he made on Tuesday were actually critical, and they helped me to reflect on my practice a little bit. I am not saying that he was entirely right, but it helped me to think on my feet and to be more sensitive on how I word my responses. Moreover, after knowing his background, I cannot help but develop sympathy for him. His purpose was to seek attention from his peers, and he did not really care if the attention was negative. He just wanted it. I did not help the situation by addressing him to provide this spotlight on him. Anyway, I think the seating plan works for now. I saw them trying to collaborate with one another. Interestingly, after creating the class rules and agreeing upon them, I think he is much more well behaved.

The third class was actually about outcast and gang. I spun it a little to touch on the bullying aspect and asked the class to set up some rules for everyone to follow. During this time, the boys told me they actually found the trouble-maker annoying, and they did not want him in the class. It came as a surprise because I thought he would at least get along with the boys. Therefore, the boys’ class rules were mainly targeting him. I asked them to think about including everyone rather than focusing on excluding him. We as a class should help one another. Then I had each group reading out loud the rules they came up and asked others if they agreed on them. It was a great activity because now they at least could feel they belong to this class and they had the responsibility to construct a good class too. Collaboration was key! 🙂

I really like the idea of group work and collaboration. Therefore, the fourth class was mainly about creating a skit about violence. I asked students to reflect on the cause and consequence of violence. Beforehand, I asked them if violence could be justifiable depending on the situation and what type of violence was acceptable. It created a good discussion in both classes, and I was happy to see that. Then, the students were put into groups to work on their skits. Some of the skits were quite imaginative. It was nice to see the students engage in the activities and everyone was participating in them. During the break, my SA gave me some suggestions on how to make it better such as giving them less preparation time and having the students provide alternative solutions. She also asked how I graded the students based on the skits. I told her that I did not. She told me that I might want to, so they would be more serious about their skits. The students would not be laughing while they were acting. I did not say anything to that and I did not assign any grades for my second class. I just thought skit was a fun way for students to learn and to show that they have learned the materials. I would see it as a summative assessment and did not see any purpose of assigning a grade to it.

I tried to implement the two suggestions to the second class. It worked well. One other  thing she suggested me to work on was the noise level. The students were too excited to work on the skit, so they were being loud. I may have to think of a strategy to address it. Asking them to calm down within 5-second-countdown?! Hm…

After school, we had a workshop on BCESIS, which was helpful. We knew we could find many information on that software. That was how I discovered a student with learning disability in my Hums 8…and my SA did not tell me about her? I could have asked. I guess it just slipped my mind. Now I need to prepare some modified worksheets for her. I was going to talk to this student because she did not hand in any of the assignments. I told her to see me after class, and she almost walked out of my room. If I did not call after her, I was pretty sure she would have just gone to another class. I asked her why she did not hand in her homework. She told me, “I am an ESL student.” I thought to myself, “nice try!” I remember I used similar strategy to have teachers be more sympathetic, so she would grade me easily. I told her that if she had trouble, she could have talked to me. She then added that she had a Special needs block and she could not write down her thoughts. I told her that it would be unfair to other students if you did not do the work. I suggested she could may be verbally summarize the chapter for me to indicated you have read the novel. She nodded. Before finalizing the decision, I wanted to talk to my SA about it. I did, and I asked her about IEP. She was not sure if the student had one. Anyway, somehow I need to modify the lesson for her to make sure she is on task.

I cannot believe I am now typing my first day of my long practicum. I have been waiting to start this adventure for so long, and here I am finally! 😀 For the past month, I have been working so hard on my inquiry project and lesson plans that I barely document my experience during my short practicum. Oh well, hopefully this time I am able to keep track of how things go. I cannot wait to share my stories and reflect upon them when I have time.

My first official lesson during my long practicum.

I was so nervous in the morning because…
1. I forgot my adaptor.
2. I tried to figure out how to get the screen set up for probably 5 minutes.
3. I was so scared that I would mispronounce my students’ names.
4. I did not know what to expect from the class.

I spent the beginning 30 minutes of the morning (8:00-8:30) reading over my lesson plan. I created this lesson in December, so it had been a while since then. My SA came into rescue at around 8:20, so she was out hunting the adaptor for me (I asked another teacher for it, but she said that I should be able to get one from my SA). I told my SA that it would be fine to start the lesson without the adaptor, and she insisted to look for it.

Anyway, I started the class by calling out the names. I tried to remember the pronunciation that my SA taught me and from the class observation. Many students were surprised by how accurate I could pronounce. They were like “wow..she got it”. The inside me was smirking. 😉 Since I could not show them the Grease trailer, I went straight into the content – the setting of The Outsiders: 1960s. We discussed the fashion, the interests, pop culture and slang. This class was so energetic that they just kept on giving me ideas. It was great to see they were so excited to answer even though some of them might sound silly. For example, I asked them what was a heater. They were like “a heater?” “a fire-lighter?” “a hot person?”. It was great to see their creative juices working in their brains. Then, we compared all those areas from back then to nowadays. It was interesting how many students thought the pop culture back then was much better than nowadays. They gave interesting answers to explain their thought processes. I wish I had it recorded down, so I would remember some of their lines.

After I finished my whole lesson, there was still around 20 minutes left. I really under-planned. In my mind, I thought that would take a lot longer. This was a good experience since now I know I might have to over plan a little bit to make sure students were really making use of their time to do their assignments. With that great amount of time, I decided to have them write a little introduction and their expectation for this class. It was fascinating to read their thoughts and the way they introduced themselves. It really showed they were still a bunch of innocent kids. They told me about their birthdays and the school/grade they are currently in (duh! of course I know about them). Many of them also indicated how they did not want to have homework or tests. A lot of them mentioned they wanted the class to be fun, which I would try my best to achieve that. One of the quieter students wrote to me and said that I was a kind and loving teacher. She looks forward to “be close to [me]”. My heart instantly melted. That was definitely the highlight of my day.

The second class was about the same. Before the students came in, I wanted to have a sip of my water. Then I found out that I left the water bottle in my dad’s car. Oh well. I guess I was just a little forgetful today. There was this kid who was labelled as “problematic” by my SA. Do not get me wrong – he does have his behaviour issues. BUT, he is so curious, and I know he has many good ideas. He asked me about an interesting question: how would people treat me if I went back to the 1960s? “because I was not white”. It was hard to really give him an accurate answer, but that question just blew my mind. I am sure he will be really interested in the novel. 🙂 I cannot wait to help him discover the incredible talents and skills that he has. This class was quieter than the previous class, which I did not like as much. I think I just need the right hook to get them engage. I do not know what it will be, but I will keep trying.

The fourth class was quite interesting too. When I walked in, some students waved and said hi to me. I felt very welcomed. And then this one student walked in and said, “Miss Lui, I missed you” in Chinese. Even though he could have spoken in English, I did feel very happy. I know I am making an impact on the students. I cannot wait to help these ELL kids to become successful. Friday will be the first step – I hope they will show up in the after-school program. I can only wish.

It was great to be teaching. I felt a little bit overwhelmed. I know I just need to get used to it. Everything is going to be okay. 🙂