I did my long practicum at Prince of Wales. I had the privilege of working under the tutelage of two experienced teachers. During the 10-week practicum, I taught applied skills 8, business education 9, marketing 11 and accounting 11/12. I enjoyed interacting with students and putting many of the theories and ideas I had learned about teaching to practice.
While I found many of the things I learned in the teacher program had prepared me well for the practicum and started to make sense in the context of classroom teaching, I quickly learned that there were gaps in my knowledge and toolkit. Specifically, I realized that developing engaging lessons was a priority that cannot be overemphasized. A lesson with a clear set of learning objectives, interesting content, and engaging student-centered activities helps one quickly catch students’ attention and hold it throughout the class. With a good lesson plan in place and students engaged and on task, teaching and learning are more likely to happen with minimum distractions. Without a good lesson plan, boredom and other classroom management issues easily set in as a result.
During the practicum, I also learned the importance of teaching at the students’ level. For all my enthusiasm to impart knowledge and experience, I need to teach and design classroom activities, projects, assignments, and assessments with my students’ abilities and capacity to learn in mind. Using grade appropriate materials and instructional language free of abstruse terms are key to teaching at students’ level. I also should adapt my lessons, instruction, and assignments to accommodate the needs of ELL and/or international students, so that they learn along with everyone else in the classroom.
I learned first-hand during the practicum that knowing all the best practices of classroom management is one thing, being able to do it is another. Due to my nature and personality, I tend to go easy on students that exhibit behavioral problems. I have learned that to be effective in managing problem behaviors, I need to set clear expectations at the outset, take notice of breaches and address them as they happen, be consistent in enforcing rules and having violators bear the consequences, escalate interventions when necessary and, all the while, show concern and care for possible situations and circumstances in students’ lives.
Lastly, I learned the importance of giving students timely feedback. Getting timely feedback on their homework, quizzes, assignments, and projects allows students to benefit from formative assessment and engage in reflective thinking and meta-cognition processes that ultimately help them become independent learners. Thanks to the experience in the practicum I now have a deeper appreciation of the significance of giving timely feedback to students.
Samples Student Work
Marketing 11 – Retail Store Design Layout Project
Marketing 11 – Co-Creation of Project Peer Assessment Criteria
