Both my mentor teachers stated I had excellent knowledge of the content I was teaching. On my final placement, I taught year 8 HASS; The New World, including Vikings, The Ottoman Empire and the renaissance, and Year 9 HASS: The Industrial Revolution Despite studying a Bachelor of Arts degree at university, minoring in History, I did not specialise in these subjects areas, therefore I had to learn the content before teaching it to the class. I found this not to be too difficult as the knowledge was fresh in my mind. I confided in my mentors and they both stated that it is impossible to know every topic in history and even they at times had to learn the content directly before they taught it. Furthermore, I taught year 9 English; studying the novel, ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’ and year 10 English; Film Techniques, studying the animated film ‘Coco’. I found English easier to teach as this was my major in my arts degree, my mentors were impressed with my knowledge on these topics, giving me excellent feedback every lesson. Despite excelling in English teaching, I found I had to study hard to be up to date with History, this is something I will continually remind myself in my teaching degree and recognise as an area that can continually be improved upon.
I found this area of my teaching to be my strong suit. Being an organised person, I found doing lesson and unit plans easy to prepare and i constantly modified and improved them as my placement continued. At the beginning of my placement, I was doing the lesson plans the night before, resulting in me staying at school until 5pm, has the placement continued, I began to do my entire week of lesson plans on Sunday afternoon. This gave me more time in the afternoons after school to grade work or meet with my mentor teacher for debriefing. By structuring and organising my lesson plans, it gave me confidence in the classroom, many times I would refer back to my lesson plan to ensure I was on track and had enough time to finish my activities. Towards the end of my placement I still did lesson plans yet felt more confident in the classroom, so I noticed myself not looking at them as frequently. Upon speaking to the older and more experienced teachers at school, they said they rarely use lesson plans, however I believe it is imperative, as a budding teacher, to keep an organized lesson plan and unit plan accessible to constantly refer back to.
In all of my unit plans, I was sure to link them back to the appropriate standards, and ensure I was following these in all of my teaching. Over my last 9-week placements, I used the schools marking criteria, keeping physical paper records, as well as inserting the grades onto their online facility. It was time consuming doing this both ways, yet I believe it was useful and imperative when it came to parent-teacher interviews, as the parents could physically see their students’ progress. In year 8 HASS I completed 5 assessments with them, ensuring to meet the standards. In year 9 HASS I did 4 assessments, in year 9 English I did 5 assessments and in year 10 English I did 2 major assessments. When marking this work, I did it on paper and on the computer. Whilst I graded all of these assessments, I did not have the opportunity to do the full year reports, something I know I will be completing throughout my teaching profession.
Whilst on my first 4-week placement, I was able to teach my year 10 class about the history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. As i do not identify with this race myself, I was ensuring I taught this in the most respectful way I could. I showed them a TED talk from the perspective of a lady who was a part of the stolen generation. This enlightened my students of the horror they had to go through yet understand what it meant to achieve reconciliation. In my 9-week placement, I was fortunate enough to attend the Reconciliation week, where the whole school attended an assembly. Here we witnessed an aboriginal man speaking about his own experiences. I have and will always have a profound respect and understanding for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders people, cultures and languages. I hope to encourage students to adopt the same mannerisms and beliefs and teach in a way that respects and enables inclusiveness between the two cultures.
In all of my classes, I allowed students to develop and use their literacy skills. Teaching History and English, I was able to encourage students to think creatively, analytically and logically, resulting in excellent pieces of written work. I had many opportunities to fulfil the literacy needs and skills of all students, creating tasks that encouraged students to think laterally and uniquely about specific topics, such as a “diary entry”, first person response, an essay, questions to answer and so on. In regard to numeracy strategies, the students were to understand timelines and specific dates in their History classes. They had to numerically sequence the dates and improve upon their numeracy skills in different ways.
Fortunately, the school I did my placement at had multiple ICT facilities. These included smart boards, projectors and personal laptops. Multiple times I used the smart board to show educational activities, inclusive classroom engagement and instructions for the activity and assessments I set for the students. The student’s used their personal laptops every lesson and submitted most of their work via electronic means.