Overall, I am extremely happy with the outcome of my practicum. I am proud of the amount of work, growth, and reflection I was able to do over the past four weeks. I feel that I have learned so much working along side my coaching teacher, practice evaluator, fellow teacher candidates, and other staff and employees at PGSS. Reflecting back on the past four weeks, there are many aspects of my pedagogy I feel I have grown and improved in, aspects I still want to continue to develop, and aspects that I feel are my strengths.

I believe one of my most improved areas where I was able to make the most growth was in assessment. I have always found it somewhat difficult to develop a consistent and effect way of marking so that the grades are fair to all the students. For my first unit (bias, perspective, and opinion in media) I created a final assignment criteria and rubric that were effective for the purposes that I needed them for, but I was not completely happy with them as I realized afterwards that they were not as detailed and specific as they needed to be. I found that while I was marking assignments there were certain issues that came up in the students’ work that I technically could not address because it was not in the criteria or rubric, so it would not be fair to take “marks” off. For my second unit (myths, legends, fables, and fairytales) I focused on creating an extremely specific and detailed criteria and rubric. I took a lot of time to really think about and develop all the aspects that needed to be part of the assignment. The result was stress-free, easy, consistent, and effective marking. I now understand the importance of knowing exactly what you are looking for in assessment and knowing why you are looking for it.

Another area I feel I greatly grew in was incorporating First People’s Principles of Learning (FPPL) into my classroom as well as explicit Indigenous content. This has always been something I have been somewhat nervous to do because of the possibility of offending people if something were to come across in the wrong way. I feel that there is also a very harshly defined idea of the “Indigenous educator” and “non-Indigenous” educator in the education system. I was proud of myself for incorporating Indigenous content into my lessons that I was familiar and comfortable with. We studied various oral, written, and visual/auditory Indigenous lessons that we connected back to the idea of sharing stories through generations. The students were very engaged and enjoyed all the stories. I was also able to include many different FPPL within my different lessons throughout the entire four weeks. I put effort into consciously including different FPPL for different lessons and finding ways to connect the FPPL to the lesson.

I feel that from the start of this practicum as well as from my last practicum, I have potentially grown the most in my ability to manage classroom behaviour while I am teaching. This was something that I used to be very intimidated by but now feel much more confident in. I have developed several strategies that have help be improve in this area. I am not afraid to state my expectations at the beginning of class for how students will behave, and I have learned that one of the keys is following through. If I were to tell a student that I will move them if they continue talking to their friend, I must do that otherwise they will perhaps not take me seriously in the future. During the four-week practicum I was not afraid to switch up the seating plan which often helped quite a bit. For students that were a reoccurring problem, constantly interrupting the class and other students’ learning, I kept them behind individually at lunch time to talk to them and sort out a solution. This almost immediately resolved the problem. Not being intimidated of directly confronting problems and not being intimidated by creating clear guidelines has been a huge improvement in my classroom management. I had a very rowdy group of grade 8s for the last two weeks and I was able to effectively manage their energy while teaching them. I implemented 10-minute walk breaks in the middle of every class as this was something the students needed at their developmental stage. Although I was intimidated to do this at the beginning of the practicum because of the possibility for students to not follow instructions, it ended up paying off in the long run. Not only did it benefit the students (grade 8s NEED to get outside to run around and burn off energy), but it ended up developing a relationship between myself and the students where they understood that I was in charge.

There are also areas that I believe I can still continue to improve and grow within. My biggest area of improvement that I would like to work on developing for next practicum is thinking about and creating my general classroom rules and policies before I begin teaching. I found that there were many rules/policies I had not even considered (which probably come simply from a lack of experience) such as: caffeine and sugar in the classroom, snacks in the classroom, earbuds during class time, late policy, and missing work policy. I had thought about and created a cellphone policy, but I had not considered the many other things that go on within a classroom that can be distracting to students and those around them. This resulted in me having to address different issues and implementing new rules in the mornings which may have caused minor confusion for some students. For my next practicum, I will create a well-thought out list of rules and policies that align with my philosophical teaching beliefs and address them on the very first day.

Another thing I would like to continue to work on and grow my ability in is always creating alternative, inclusive options for my students. I felt that I did a good job at this with the help of my EA, but without an EA I think there will be room for improvement. For my next practicum I will focus on creating an informative pre-assessment to inform me of my students’ abilities. I will then always create an option (for the students who need it) that will allow them to work on the activity at their level whether that includes making it shorter or perhaps changing the content to something simpler. As a teacher with 30 kids in the class, I understand that it is hard to sometimes attend personally to everyone, but I will make a conscious effort to catch up with the students who especially need it at least once a day to see how they are feeling with the class and the content.

I would also like to focus on creating more apparent and explicit connections between the learning and the activities in my classroom. I think I need to remember to clearly state to students why we are learning something and then remember to also explain why we are doing a specific activity that applies that learning. Especially when teaching younger grades, because I am not used to that age, I tend to assume that students will make the connections themselves (and perhaps some do), but the majority of the students will not. When students do not understand why they are learning something or why they are doing a specific activity/assignment, it can be frustrating for them. My goal in my next practicum will be to always mention why we are learning something and why we are doing that certain activity to apply that learning. This will be beneficial to the students and to myself.

Lastly, reflecting back on the entire 490 practicum. I have several strengths that have helped me greatly. I believe that my ability to plan and organize my lessons, as well as gather what I need to physically have in the classroom with me to facilitate my lessons, is strong. I never felt stressed, overwhelmed, or underprepared entering the classroom because I always spent a great amount of time preparing my lessons. I always made sure to have all my supplies and printing ready to go before the students entered the classroom. I planned ahead by creating unit plans so I knew when the optimal time would be to hand out criteria for final assignments as well as when would be a good time to give the students work blocks. I was also able to plan several computer labs for my students which helped them greatly. I also took great care in thinking about and implementing the order of the lessons and the content I taught so that it would make the most sense to the students. My time management was always one of my strengths. I almost always executed the lesson exactly as I had timed it. In situations where that was not the case, I always had planned back up and was able to easily use it. They few times we ran “over” time, I was able to seamlessly integrate the part we still needed to complete into the next day or after break. This made the students feel comfortable in the classroom setting. I believe that knowledge of content was also one of my strengths. I think it is very important for a teacher to be able to talk causally and freely about the information that they are presenting so that it is more accessible to students. I always made sure to research a little extra information to have in my head (e.g. current event examples of what we were learning) so that I could facilitate deeper discussions or offer the students “fun facts” to support their learning. This of course is extremely important because students can become easily confused or frustrated if the information is not presented to them in an organized, knowledgeable, and confident manner. The students also need to feel that the teacher has a good understanding of the knowledge so that they feel comfortable asking the teacher any questions they have.

I am so excited to continuously be able to implement my strengths as well as to develop in areas where I want to improve. I feel that going forward I have strong direction and intention. As teachers, I believe we constantly discover new strengths and continue to work on developing the aspects of our pedagogies where we can grow and improve. I am looking forward to practicing, growing, and reflecting in my next practicum, 491.