Good evening, and welcome to the Weekly Recap show!  I am your host, Mr. Tsang, and I will be discussing the ups and downs — all the juicy highlights — that transpired during the First Week of the extended practicum.  Let’s get started!

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I have to say… I get a sense that I hadn’t truly grasped how much there was to keep in mind until this week.  Sure, I had had an extended 2 week stay at the school at the end of last year, but I was still unexperienced back then — I knew little about assessment, and primarily concerned myself with maintaining a positive (and professional) relationship with the students, practicing good teaching methods, and formulating/implementing lesson plans.  At the time, my SA would assign me some marking tasks to ease me into things…

… and well, everything finally makes sense!  Now I truly grasp the significance of my SA assigning me those marking tasks and asking me to do various tasks, from signing planners and marking spelling assignments to making photocopies.  It took me a while (and quite a few mistakes) before I finally conquered the photocopier, but I digress.  And once the first week started off, I found myself… relatively calm and relaxed.  Sure, each day was filled with a mountain of different tasks — meeting and greeting students as they enter the classroom; checking homework for completion and marking their assignments; planning, touching up, editing, rehashing, and polishing my lesson plans; making photocopies; clarifying instructions; settling disagreements… everything felt natural because my SA has given me plenty of chances to practice prior to the beginning of my extended practicum.  My admiration grows… because THERE’S SO MUCH TO KEEP TABS ON!!!

It’s very exciting, to say the least.  There were a few instances where I felt frustrated and lost, some instances where I felt down… and I found that focusing on my students and asking myself, “what should I do next to get them where I want them to go?” helped me stay grounded, on my feet, and ready to adapt and adjust.  I’m practicing my organizational skills, so let’s separate my comments by headings…

Lessons learned – STAY ORGANIZED.  I know that this is one of the weakest areas of my teaching practice.  The way I make sense of the world around me is somewhat vague and “networked” — reading certain words and phrases call up entire networks of relevant knowledge and information, and as a result, I end up taking a lot of my notes that way.  Teaching has emphasized the importance of being SPECIFIC and GROUNDED — I applaud my SA’s patience with my lesson plans, as often I would write down a phrase when what I envision within my head are 3 bullet points and an explanation or two.  Also, I realize that I am a rather messy person and leave things around all over the place — after a particularly busy day, I realized that the hexagonal table on which I was working (it’s about 1.5-2metres across) was completely filled with papers from several different projects.  Clean as I go, I need to…

Surprises – I very surprised by how hard my students tried to make things work for me.  I’ve seen the class evolve since I first met them in September, but I am still impressed by how attentive they are when I’m standing in front of the class.  I was also surprised that the students who had originally struggled the most have tried the hardest to participate — this is confirmation that affirming and building off their responses will encourage further participation.  Also, I opened up a can of worms during my science stations sessions — by giving the students freedom to work independently, in partners, or as an entire group (within the table groups), I had created the possibility for someone to be left out.  And as Murphy’s Law would suggest, someone indeed had felt left out and I had to get in there to help dispel the situation… while things worked out in the end, unfortunately the affected student was not able to get much done.

A big surprise was that I discovered possible evidence of plagiarism in some work that I had assigned.  After teaching a lesson on figurative language (focusing on similes and metaphors), I learned that a small handful of my students had written down the exact same metaphor.  I had expected some collaborating, but I didn’t expect word-for-word copying… on a hunch, I punched that metaphor into Google and found an online resource (for kids!) that… contained several other metaphors on the students’ papers.  I was a little disheartened to find this… not so much because they had tried to pull a fast one o’er Mr. Tsang, but more the implications of passing off others’ work as their own.  The students don’t realize that the act of handing in someone else’s work implies that their own work isn’t as good.  That thought infuriated me — the students might not be the best in the world in whatever I have them do, but I want them all to be PROUD of their own work!  With my SA’s help, I hope to turn this into a good learning opportunity, as academic dishonesty has very serious implications further down the road.

Things I was happy with – this is always going to be the shortest section.  I was very pleased with how the students remained engaged during the science stations.  I had a few of them come up to me, both during and afterwards, telling me how they really liked the stations.  Also, I was happy with getting some quality 1-on-1 teaching in during the self-directed math program — it’s always great to see those “A-ha!” lightbulbs go off behind the eyes!

Things that need improvement – my social studies lesson… in my opinion, was a complete failure.  I kept the discussion open and as a result ended up losing myself at times.  I ended up talking for >80% of the entire lesson… which was over an hour in length.  Completely unacceptable… I need a lot of work on flow.  Moreover, my lesson plan looked great on paper… but in getting lost, I found that I had completely forgotten about an activity I had planned — an activity that was meant to get the students doing something to give myself time to regroup, as well as to give them a break from listening to me drone on and on.  The lesson plan that I had in my hand… given, I had been concentrating very hard on the clarity of my explanations and instructions (which I think I had done fairly well), but that definitely does not mean I should be neglecting any of the other aspects of teaching a proper lesson.

Also, I found that the science stations were rather difficult for a lot of the students.  I will be going through and refining them… perhaps taking the ‘second’ task and extending it through to the second activity.  For each Extreme Environment I aim to have something hands-on for them to play with, investigate, observe, and make hypotheses from.  Perhaps reducing the overall workload will give the students a better fighting chance?  40 minutes to read pages of information and answer questions is proving to be rather difficult for many of my students… another reminder that my tasks and assignments need to be adjusted to my students’ levels.  Granted, I was trying to do that, but marking the assignments were a good way for me to assess the students’ current levels of achievement.  I’m going to be keeping this in mind.

Things I intend to focus on – as Second Week rolls in, I will be stepping up the organizational side of things:  I will be looking for ways to stay organized (paper-wise) and remain on the look-out for any other tells of students’ learning styles/methods/challenges.  And perhaps start a log book/document where I jot down things I notice, lest I forget.  Also, I will be focusing heavily on lesson flow for any lessons I teach during this week, as I feel that I have done clarity enough justice.  I can rest assured that with my (current) abilities, I will be able to teach without misrepresenting any information the students need to learn!

PS — I am happy to report that the conclusions I arrived at as a result from my inquiry project remain confirmed!  More details on this to come after I have gathered more data and done yet more “reflecting”