Practicum Thoughts – Week One
The first week at my practicum school has been very busy and exciting so far. It’s only the Thursday of the first week of what is supposed to be an observation practicum, and I’ve already had a chance to teach parts of lessons and build lesson plans that I could be delivering in their entirety next week. I feel lucky that I have already had the chance to present at least a part of a lesson to both of my school advisors and to have gotten such wonderful and thorough feedback about what I did, and what I can do to improve my practice for the next set of lessons that I do.
On the topic of feedback, I submitted half a dozen lesson plans for consideration, and it looks like I’m going to be teaching at least three of them next week, even if they’re going to be substantially amended or in at least one case it will be shortened to be only part of a lesson. Though I’m disappointed that I will not get the whole class to test out my material, I am still very excited that I have an opportunity to do a lesson that is truly my own and not something that my advisor was planning to do and let me do in their stead.
Now that I have presented at least once to each of my advisors, they have been encouraging me to expand beyond my assigned courses and observe courses in other departments, in order to witness different teaching styles and classroom management practices. I have to admit that it is interesting to see how other classes deal with issues of how to conduct their lessons. So far I have been lucky enough to take watch part of a home economics class and a physical education class. Both were very informative about how to ensure that time is managed properly and the extent to which giving clear instructions is important to ensuring that the lesson is completed properly. With my advisors’ permission, I’m looking forward to being an active participant in one of the PE courses next week.
When I haven’t been preparing lesson plans or teaching the lesson plans of my two advisors, I’ve been learning a lot simply by observing and interacting with the students that are in my classes. In many ways the students I have observed are very similar to how my own classes in high school acted, but they have also had an eagerness to succeed that I never really found among some of my classmates, especially in the earlier grades. It’s refreshing and certainly is likely to change my practice, since the students seem very prepared and motivated to succeed.
Tomorrow is going to be a test free day, which will be a nice opportunity to get back into a routine and start observing classes that aren’t full of anxious students worried about exams and their term grades. Hopefully I can move to a more advantageous position in the room to observe my advisors directly; I am very interested to see what they do in order to get the attention of students and what kind of body and facial language is used to convey meaning. These are concepts that I cannot observe from my original position in the classroom.