CFE Reflection – Final
It’s difficult to believe that the field experience is coming to an end and that this coming week I won’t be going back to Fraser Park to help teach the students again. I learned a lot about how to interact with all sorts of different youth while I was the detention facility which I will eventually use in my teaching practice.
On Wednesday, I had an opportunity to meet with the other student teachers and the learning support teacher to learn more about how to create individualized education plans, which I found very interesting. During my long practicum placement I had also learned about IEPs from the practicum school and their learning support staff, so I was interested to see that there were some significant differences between how things are done in the community schools as opposed to how they are created at Fraser Park, and I have to admit that I think the way it’s done at Fraser Park makes more sense to me. This is because there is much more consultation with the students about what their individual needs are, and because the students themselves are providing the information in the IEP, they are much more likely to buy in and follow the instructions because it’s things they have identified as what will help them succeed in the classroom.
The only other thing that needs noting is how comfortable the students have become at seeing myself and the other student teachers in the classrooms. They were very easygoing to be around for the most part, and I found that the ones I had seen on a regular basis were starting to ask me about myself and open up about themselves far more than in the first two weeks of the practicum. This isn’t to say that private or personal information was being divulged, but there was a greater willingness to talk and create a more casual environment, instead of being standoffish. One of my main observations was how easily the students would engage in teasing with each other. I was concerned at first, and once I had some discussions with the staff I realized that it was a way of showing their comfort around each other. In this last week, I saw that a few of the students were beginning to involve me in that teasing. None of it was particularly hurtful, and most of the comments revolved around my car and how old and small it is compared to some of the other cars that I could be driving. The only thing about those comments that caught me off guard was that the students could see me drive into the parking lot from their residential units in the morning, and it’s not something that I would have considered before they started talking about what kind of car I had and how small it was. Again, this was not something that I felt was a concern, and for me more than anything it was interesting to see how they began to involve me in the social structure of their classes and daily structure.
I’m so very lucky and pleased that I was given the opportunity to teach at Fraser Park over the last three weeks, and that I also had a chance to learn and to strengthen my ability to relate to students and build an inclusive classroom community. I’m looking forward to applying these lessons to my future classroom and being more willing to appropriately open up about myself to my students and create more genuine connections with the students that I will be teaching.