The warm weather of 20 degree Celsius brings the second week of CFE to a great end. I taught another lesson for Sukhbir again. I realized the importance of judgement on how comfortable students are feeling toward the current topic and changed the lesson accordingly. Since the majority of the students are still not quite familiar with the concepts taught last class, I decided to defer the new materials to next week and have students familiarize the current concept first. I do appreciated such freedom that Sukhbir gave me and enjoyed the flexibility since when I was back in Churchill the schedules are usually tight plus public schools started the year 3 weeks later due to the strike, I did not have too much room for similar judgement call. I am glad that this CFE not only allowed me to experience things in other different areas but also provided me chance to improve my overall teaching skills.
Generally speaking, this week I started to get back the feeling of a teacher, instead of a observing student teacher. The main contribution that I made this week was through teaching in classroom, and it felt very different to long practicum teaching in many aspects: the class size, the difficulty level, the learning atmosphere, and the resource. The class size of St. John’s is usually around 15 students, whereas Churchill has nearly twice as many, so the classroom management was much more challenging in Churchill and in contrast it allowed me to focus more on developing some other teaching skills in St. John’s class, of course as I move on for the career of teaching I believe I will be more and more able to focus on many different skills at once. As a IB World School, the difficulty level in St. John’s is generally higher. In terms of difficulty, as I compare to the Math 9 Enriched class that I taught in Churchill, I can see the subtle difference such that the enriched class in St. John’s tend to follow the IB textbook more, maybe adding a bit more difficulty, whereas the class in Churchill tend to jump out of the textbook and use lots of external worksheet and activities etc. Since St. John’s is an independent school, parents tend have high expectation for the learning environment, so I felt like the school is very neat not only physically but academically. There is relatively not a wide variation among students’ performance, of course this is only according to my snapshot observation and a few marking experience. The learning atmosphere in St. John’s was very academic to the point that students can stay focus and engaged even the entire class was lecture-based. Finally the resource students have in St. John’s is very rich such that every single students have a laptop, and every single classroom has a SMART Board (see here for the link), allowing so many possibilities for different styles of teaching due to such high access to technology. For instance when I was to show one of the application of a math topic, I could show the class one of the free apps available on App Store/Play Store that students could refer to to see the connection of mathematics and real life. In conclusion, I think the school has so many things going on, and just like their slogan “making a difference”, I think all the school has and has been striving for really allow them to make a huge difference in education.
^^The roller coaster activity that students can build their own roller coaster and the goal was to have the marble safely pass through the track without falling off. That was a connection to the Playland trip and was totally inspiring.