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Act as a cultural facilitator when carrying out duties.
Act as a cultured professional who is at once an interpreter, facilitator and critic of culture when carrying out duties.
Fourth Field Experience: St-Edmond High School
Feb to Apr 2023
During my last field experience, I made it a point to relate all classroom materials I proposed to meaningful topics that my students might find interesting or relevant to their lives. I wanted to ensure that all students felt engaged in my classroom, while learning about familiar or new topics.
For my Secondary 2 students, I created a unit about schools around the world. I used materials that already existed to present to them the realities of other schools and what students do there on the daily. At the end of the unit, I created an assignment where students had to imagine their dream school. They had to incorporate ideas from schools all around the world we had discussed during the unit, as well as create components to a school they would like to attend. Students created fun dreams schools where they demonstrated their ability to reinvest understanding of texts, while showing their personality and interests.
For my Secondary 4 students, I was able to discuss advanced topics about social issues that touch them directly. The first unit I did revolved around a podcast that told the story of a teenage parent. Through this topic, we discussed safe sex practices, abortion and adoption. Even though the students found that topics were heavy at times, they appreciated the fact that we had real discussions about situations that might affect them. In addition, toward the end of the internship, I was able to create a short unit on career planning, which allowed students to complete personality test, do some networking and learn about careers they might never had heard of before. The students communicated that they also appreciated this unit, as it allowed them to start thinking about their future and what choices they might want to make.
Below you will find some of the materials mentioned, which I created for the purposes of my internship. These materials reflect my attention to Professional Competency 1.
Secondary 2 and 4 intern introduction slides
Secondary 4 safe sex practices discussion questions
Secondary 2 written production plan
Secondary 4 career test handout
Secondary 4 career planning discussion prompt
Third Field Experience: Georges P. Vanier Elementary School
Aug to Dec 2022
All throughout my third field experience, I acted as a cultural facilitator between the students and the topics I taught them. As it was mandatory in my teaching context to follow the workbook bought by the parents at the beginning of the year, I had to complete a certain number of pages within a given timeframe. However, I did not hesitate to bring in outside sources and media that are relevant to students and current with trends and interests, to relate the materials I was teaching to the real world. This assured that students could develop their critical thinking by directly relating their learning to their immediate environment. I also always encouraged students to reflect on the topics and how those can relate to their everyday lives. As an example, with grade six groups, we explored a unit on trends and fads across history. I asked students to tell me about trends and fads that they have seen recently. The social media app TikTok was immediately brought up. Even though the workbook does not mention this social media app, as it did not exist yet when the workbook was created, we reflected on the topic within their own digital reality.
Furthermore, I had the liberty to complement my teaching with some activities outside of the workbook. I created activities and lesson plans that related to the students’ specific needs. As an example, after correcting writing assignments from grade five students, I noticed that they struggled with capitalization and punctuation. Nevertheless, according to the Progression of Learning and the QEP, these notions should be mastered in grade five. That is why I created a fun lesson that combined physical movement and grammar to reinforce their knowledge of these rules. This kinetic style of learning facilitated in-depth learning of the grammar rules and helped students remember those in the future. I am proud to say that mistakes relating to capitalization and punctuation were significantly less frequent in the following written assignment.
In general, I strongly believe that I demonstrated that I am a cultured professional that students can come to at any time. It happened at times where students would ask me questions that I did not know the answer to. In these cases, I did not hesitate to use the tools at my disposition to find the answers and encourage students to look for answers as well. I also quickly identified some of my limitations, such as with robotics technology, and did not shy away from learning about those and filling in the gaps in my knowledge, alongside the students.
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