General Reflection
The two-week practicum from October 27 to November 7 was a great opportunity for us to observe, discover, and most importantly, practice on teaching! In general I think the entire practicum was of satisfaction, although there were some confusion in the very beginning due to the large size of school and some misunderstanding.
Classes Observed
I am lucky to get chance to observe many different classes. Here are the classes that I have observed:
Math: IB Math SL 12, Math 8 Hand Timeline, Math 8, Math 9 Enriched, Math 9, IB Math SL 11, Pre-calculus 12, IB Math HL 12, AP Calculus 12
English: English 9, English 10
Modern Languages: IB Mandarin 12, Japanese Beginner 11
TOK: TOK 11, TOK 12
ELL: ELL Level 2
Social: Psychology 11, Geography 12
My Observations from Classes
- Overhead projectors are used in many classes.
- Teachers voices are crystal clear, like they don’t even have to put efforts on it.
- In some classes students are required to bring textbook.
- Students are usually given plenty of work time (usually more than 30 mins).
- Ms. Waight gave significantly plenty of time for students to work, usually more than 40 minutes.
- Ms. Knott could actually produce pretty much identical lessons for the repeated blocks.
- Ms. Knott asked volunteers to yell out different (if at all) answers and had the rest of the class vote.
- Ms. Waight has seating plans to accommodate ELL students in the class.
- Mr. Sale used online polling system to help tracking students’ preference among the books.
- Mr. MacFarlane had a very fun BINGO game for helping students’ Japanese learning.
- Mr. Pirie let students to write on the windows and tables with erasable markers, he told me that according to some educational research letting students to write on vertical surface or surface other than paper can foster students’ interest in learning.
- Ms. Puzio used a great class discussion rule which she picked the first person to speak, and the first person got to pick the next person among those who wanted to speak, and so on.
- Ms. Kozuki had a long conversation with me during students’ work time and after class; she was a great communicator and had many thoughtful opinions on educating ELL students.
- Teaching strategies are different among teacher, and even within the same teacher the teaching strategy may vary among different grade levels.
- I have taught 7 classes, most of them went fairly smoothly, in fact when I was teaching I realized time went faster than expected.