Final Reflection:
After a nine week practical teaching period at Bosmansdam High School I have completely changed my outlook on the teaching profession and my personal capacity as a teacher. This teaching experience has been very valuable in preparing me for my future career as a teacher and I am now looking forward to making a difference in the lives of the young adults in this country.
Initially, when I started my PGCE degree I struggled to understand the relevance of the course and its application in teaching. This course was so different from my B. A. Degree and it was very difficult to understand theory that had a practical element to it. I found everything rather superficial as the content that we examined in the first half of the year lacked the link to practical application. This lead me to feel rather despondent about teaching and wondering whether or not I was going into the correct profession. I constantly questioned my abilities as I quickly became disillusioned and started to lose the drive to learn and to attend class. Having finally attended a school and had the opportunity to practice the theory that I learnt I have been able to make the link between the theory and the practice and regain my confidence in my ability to teach.
Teaching at a school such as Bosmansdam High School is an eye opening experience. It is by no means a poor school but when compared to the schools in its surrounding areas one can see the struggles the school and the learners face on a daily basis. Please see my about page for further information. The socio-economic situation of the school and its learners had a great impact on my growth as a teacher. When I first started I feared that the stigmatization Bosmansdam faces would be true and that I would be teaching delinquent children who cared more about drugs and alcohol and where just generally unmanageable. Instead I found learners who may be noisy and do not always follow 'social etiquette' but they also wanted to take risks and were not afraid of being wrong. These learners wanted to learn. My experience at Bosmansdam has made me realise that I will never fit in at a school with all the privileges and where the learners take their education for granted. Personally, I need to know that what I am doing is having an impact on the people I am teaching and teaching children who are capable of teaching themselves is not for me. I got up every morning of my teaching practical wondering what interesting questions my learners would ask me that day and I went to sleep excited about showing them something new. I suspect that it would not be the same at a privileged school.
Another reason why I was able to learn so much is because of the teachers of Bosmansdam High School. The staff at this school work extremely hard within some trying circumstances and are still able to greet you with a smile. They are truly inspirational individuals and I was honored to be working with them over this period of time. I learnt many valuable lessons due to their willingness to let me take as many classes I needed and experiment as many times as I wished. One teacher even let me create a digital lesson using screencast-o-matic and then encouraged me to get feedback from the learners. All the teachers were also willing to pass on their knowledge of the teaching profession which included tips and tricks which will help make my experience teaching easier. For example my mentor suggested I start preparing my grammar lessons and exercises before the school term starts and if I am asked to set a paper I should have this ready before school as well so that everyone can ensure that the learners are adequately prepared. I learned so much from these teachers and I would not have been able to develop my teaching style into what it is today had it not been for their willingness to share and get me involved as much as possible.
My most valuable experience was being given a rather bright grade 11 English class whose teacher was absent for a considerable amount of time. The lady who was watching them approached me and asked if I would like to take them so that they could at least learn during this period instead of completing tasks the whole time. I spent the first three weeks of my practical teaching this class without a teacher to give me marks and instead got to learn who I was as a teacher and how I enjoyed to interact with my learners. I feel that every student teacher should teach as many times as possible without getting marked before they ask a teacher to mark them officially. For me I did not have the added pressure of 'an authority' watching over me and I did not have to view my mistakes as negative marks on a score sheet but rather learning opportunities. I learned so much with this class, for example to substantiate any higher level vocabulary with an easy to follow explanation so that I do not lose their attention.
Over all this was an extremely valuable experience for me; I did not find anything as having no value because even 'boring' things such as marking or invigilating taught me something which I will use in the future. This experience has been a rejuvenating experience and I am ready to get back to class and work as hard as I can so that I can be the best teacher I can possibly be next year.
Week 9:
Unfortunately my final week at Bosmansdam has been completed. The past week was dedicated to tests so no classes were offered. This severely hindered my final preparation for my portfolio as I always felt that I was disrupting teachers who were marking if I asked them to sign something.
As previously stated, I was unable to teach this week and so my reflections will be based on my experiences with marking and observations of the teachers at Bosmansdam High School.
This past week has been filled with stress for all the educators as many are marking Matric papers or the grade 9 ANAS tests. Some are unlucky and are marking both. I attempted to ease their load by marking a few papers and I was unpleasantly surprised by the poor quality of writing and argumentation displayed by the learners. I have now started questioning what I could have done differently which could have improved the learners' academic writing skills. Please do not assume I am being overly fussy about how people write, I am concerned because the errors are actually impeding meaning. In other words I was not always certain what they were trying to say. As many will understand this is a big problem because the learners may know the work but be unable to express themselves clearly enough to achieve a mark that accurately reflects their knowledge.
As an English teacher I feel I should have created more extended writing tasks for the learners so that they could practice and so that I could have seen where they were struggling before they had to be tested. I will definitely be addressing these issues in my future classes by setting an extended writing piece early in the year. Another thing that may possibly help is to find common errors which occur during the acquisition of English, for example confusing effect with affect or confusing their and there. I will then have to teach my learners how to avoid these errors.
A possible reason for the poor performance in these tests may relate to a lack of moderated tasks in the classroom. Bosmansdam has rather large classes, which average 40 learners. As any teacher will know the more learners in a class the more noise there is. I have observed that teachers are spending so much time settling a class that they have very little time to get through the lesson and there is often no time left to practice what was learnt. In my future classes I will have to find a way to overcome this. I have already started looking into interactive teaching platforms which can be used after school which will make tasks easier for both the learners and me. Edmodo is a good example of an interactive teaching platform. Another possibility is having a Flipped Classroom, however, realistically neither of these possible solutions will be options in under-privileged schools.
Another thing I noticed from observing the teachers around me was that many were over stressed due to marking. I have to find some system of organisation which will alleviate some of this stress because I don't want to experience what those teachers went through. Any suggestions on this point would be most welcome.
This week was probably the most unsettling week of my teaching practical, but I can definitely say I learnt a lot from this experience. I am really excited to finally have a class of my own and attempt some of the new things I have learned.
Week 8:
This week started with a bang... which kept on resounding to create the cacophony of pandemonium that was the final week before tests start. It was during this week that I realised just how stressful teaching can be. I hope that one day when I have my classes I will be planning in advance so everything is not a giant rush.
I scheduled a few lessons for this week, just to be sure I had the correct amount and also because I hate doing nothing. My discipline in the classrooms is still an issue apparently. I have adopted Mr Dirks's approach to self-improvement and have started asking the classes where I can do better. I have to know that discipline is an issue when the learners are the ones telling me I need to be more strict.
However, this makes me wonder, are we all so used to working in silence that when I encourage a class to be a little noisy so that we can interact they automatically assume that this is lesson without discipline? I must be cautious is saying this though as I don't want to disregard relevant feedback. I have therefore been trying to watch how other teachers ensure their classes are disciplined as well as what can lead to losing control of the class.
Certain things I cannot emulate. For example, I have noticed that the male teachers tend to get more respect, presumably because they seem scarier. I am certainly not interested in changing myself into a male in order to get results so I can disregard that one. Female teachers who are stern and never smile also seem to have rather quite classes but I don't want to be the type of person who is unhappy all the time. I would rather have fun with my class as we all learn together and grow as individuals. I want to be able to take an interest in their lives and their work. I need to try adapt my teaching style in such a way that I can retain my positivity and passion for learning without allowing the learners to take advantage of this and disrupt the lesson. I have been doing some research on this topic and I have found a couple of videos by Rita Pierson which have been helpful. I have attached the links at the bottom of this post for anyone who is interested.
Another thing I have noticed is that teachers need to develop into emotionally strong individuals. Over the course of this week I was privileged enough to sit in on grade 8 creative writing lessons where the learners were writing about their fathers. The teacher allowed these children to do something amazing: vent about all the heartache they had in their lives which related to their fathers. Of course there were many learners who wrote lovely stories about amazing men doing wonderful things but I was truly shocked by the cruelty that goes on in some houses that we might not be aware of. It was difficult for me to moderate my response so that I did not become overly emotional and thus upset the learners. This was a difficult thing to do, because part of me was so shocked by what I was hearing and another wanted to start fixing all these problems. I have had to think long and hard about these lessons because I feel it is so easy to react in the wrong way. My personal task for next week is thus to research methods of dealing with emotional trauma in the classroom.
I honestly believe that emotional healing took place in these creative writing classes, which just shows the power of a single teacher who cares enough to make a difference. In the future, I hope to be able to use English in a similar way in my own classes, but I would like to do some research on possible negative outcomes before I attempt it.
Week 7:
As much as I continuously promote preparation I have had to accept that not all things can be planned. My English Mentor teacher has been pushing me to prepare less saying that I will not have enough time to prepare each lesson when I am a teacher. After last week I am beginning to see her point. So my goal for this week was to prepare a little less.
It has been quite a challenge but I began to get more comfortable with it as the week progressed. One thing that I have noticed, is that no matter how much planning you do learners will often deviate from your chosen lesson strategy. This is not to say they digress away from the topic at hand but rather that they show you, through their questions and answers that they wish to be taught in a different way.
Something I have been pondering over the past week is whether or not I have been hindering myself and my learner by preparing too much. Do I stop the natural flow of the lesson because I have a certain sequence of events in mind?
Something I have figured out how to do this week is to be prepared in terms of making sure I know the content extremely well and have a rough idea of how I would like the lesson to progress. However, I do not plan exactly what I will say and instead let my speech flow extemporaneously. This has lead to much more holistic lessons where I do not feel intimidated by learner's questions as they cannot distract me from a plan that I do not have. To explain this more clearly, I do not have a set speech which the lesson follows and thus any questions can be logically added to the lesson as they do not distract me from any predetermined plot or speech.
This lesson has served me well and it definitely helped increase my isiXhosa evaluation mark. I am very happy with what I achieved and even if my mark had not been good I would have been happy as I felt it was the best lesson I had presented for isiXhosa.
This experience has also taught me that one should not dismiss the advice of anyone, no matter how ludicrous it sounds. For example, if I had disregarded, Ms Gouws (my mentor teacher) I would never
have improved my teaching style in such a way. Thanks to her my lesson planning is less stressful for me and more beneficial for my learners.
Week 6:
At the beginning of this week I decided to get most of my lessons out of the way so that I could just teach for fun and not have to stress about being marked. Something I have learnt about myself is that I hate being graded or moderated. Most of the time I feel more nervous when I know I am being evaluated than when a teacher just gives me the opportunity to teach.
So, I made a plan to get as many evaluations out of the way. This is most definitely easier said than done, as I presented most of my lessons over two days. This meant I had five lessons on the one day and six lessons on the other and I can now truly say I have a better idea of what it means to be a teacher... lots of after hours work.
Looking back on those lessons I can still say with all honesty that preparation is key. In the lessons where I was less prepared the learners were often less engaged and more disruptive.
I also found that the learners pick up when you are passionate about a topic. It is the strangest phenomenon but every single time I teach poetry the learners are always much better behaved and have much more fun. I can only attribute this to the fact that I love poetry and they pick up on my enthusiasm. I also noticed I tend to jump around the class when I am teaching poetry so maybe that is what is keeping them entertained. Either way they seem to learn more when I am excited and having fun and that is the main objective.
Something else I picked up is the wonders a video can have on a lesson. If you have a disruptive class and you want them to settle down and start learning, show them a video and their mouths just shut and their eyes become glued to the front. Its amazing the difference it makes. Why stress yourself out by shouting when you can simply push play. Of course there are many problems with this as I'm sure anyone will realise. For example, why should one reward a naughty class? Also, does this not eliminate the need for a teacher if the class just has videos played to them all the time? Therefore i propose that video usage is moderated. Use it as a tool to calm a class down but don't let it replace your teaching. Rather use it to enhance or compliment your lesson, instead of allowing it to be your lesson. Also if you know that you have a difficult class, don't wait for them to get disruptive. Play the video as they come in so that they immediately focus and don't become naughty.
Despite the fact that I learnt a lot this week I am really glad it is over. I feel dead and I just want a day of sleeping. It is surprising that something can be fun and draining at the same time. I now understand why teachers need holidays.
Week 5:
The most important thing I have learnt this week is that you can’t learn if you don’t get completely involved. I say this because up until now I have been struggling to get involved with extra-curricular activities and only after I actually stopped looking at what I couldn't do and instead focused on what I could learn did I realise exactly how much I had missed out on.
For example, I had the pleasure of attending the Bosmansdam interschool tournament this weekend. I could have viewed this as a boring day where I wouldn’t understand any of the sports, but with my new found insight I decided that I would not let my ignorance stop me from fully experiencing the day. I also decided not to be negative about a seven hour day in the sun plus a two hour bus ride. I’m glad I made these decisions as I had a really amazing day on Saturday. Yes I did get sunburnt and yes I was initially a bit confused about the rules of each sport but I got to know the learners a bit better and no one had any problem explaining the rules of each game to me.
This leads me to the second thing I have learnt this week: you don’t get anything if you don’t ask for it. For example, I would not have gained any knowledge about the different sports if I had not asked either teachers or learners to explain to me. Tied closely to this lesson about asking for help, is the lesson of knowing when to admit that you don’t know everything. I think it was a really fun and confidence boosting experience for some of the learners to explain something to a ‘teacher.’
Furthermore, I was able to get some extra-curricular hours done as I asked Mrs Grunning if she needed any help with anything. Luckily for me, she needed an extra photographer for Saturday, so I spent many hours, one with each different sport, taking photographs of the players. I also got to take some photos of the spectators for the school website.
In the build-up to Saturday, the learners had been a bit restless. The teachers realise that little academic work will be done on the Friday before and thus deemed Friday a ‘gees’ day, known to the learners as the Big Brag. The entire day was dedicated to celebrating the learners who made the sports teams and creating spirit for the interschool sports day. I cannot fully describe the power of something like this. The entire school came together in a way that I have never seen before and united behind their sports teams. This just shows me that school should be more than just academics and one should never underestimate the power of school unity.
Bosmansdam learners cheering for the u16 A Netball
team after a spectacular win.
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