Mariana Groot
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During this practicum I was assigned to an all girls accelerate year 9 English class. When I met my AT she informed me that the girls in the class were mostly excellence level students but pointed out a few of the students who sometimes need a little extra guidance/prompting. I was told that I would observe for the first three weeks and start teaching in my last week and that I would be teaching creative writing. Obviously this being my first practicum experience I sort of thought this was normal but later learned from my appraiser/fellow student teachers that it was not so normal to be only teaching in the last week. My AT explained to my appraiser that the reason I did not get to teach more was due to time restrictionsThe teaching I observed in my time there began with the girls working on a static image based on a short story of their choice. After they had completed their images the next unit was on essay writing. My AT taught them essay writing by using the write that essay website which was interesting. There were quite a lot of students who protested against using the write that essay tool as they said they liked writing in their own way freely on word without having the write that essay template. I also noticed there were quite a few tech issues with write that essay that slowed down the learning but all in all it gave the students a clear guided template to follow and make writing their first essay quite straight forward. The girls were seated in groups but were conscientious and managed themselves really well. They were always on task and my AT never once needed to raise her voice or really tell anyone to stay on task. My AT had a really good sense of humor and rapport with the girls and I think this also helped with the extremely on task behaviour and motivation levels. She also had certain rewards in place such as a word of the week box where they had to write the definition for the word of the week and a name was drawn from the box at the end of the week along with a prize.
I also had a lot of trouble getting used to the students having so much freedom with technology as when I was at high school if you got caught with your phone twice you were suspended. Obviously the girls were really well behaved so I never really caught them not doing what they were supposed to be doing when I was floating around the class but I am in anticipation of how tricky this will be next practicum at a public school. I did find it hard to accept that they were allowed to have headphones in listening to music during some tasks as it would have been good to see them interacting with others and sharing ideas. The headphones issue was also quite tricky sometimes as you could be giving instructions and not notice that one student had their headphones in as they are so hard to spot from a distance. In my last week I taught the whole week on creative writing and introduced them to the topic followed by setting them two creative writing tasks to choose from. Both the activities were creative writing prompts with a starter sentence and they had to complete the story and craft it into a piece of work to be marked.  Each lesson had a specific writing tool they also learned which they could use to improve the pieces of creative writing they were working on for example showing versus telling. The challenge I had wasn’t the girls understanding the content it was giving clear instructions as they were sometimes confused about what I was asking them to do and if they needed to be taking notes or if the work should be done on their laptops etc. I also found that if the noise levels got up all I had to do was to practice proximity and circulate that area and the noise died down but yet again this class was an exception to the rule. Overall I really ended up enjoying teaching English as the girls enjoyed the tasks I set and were always happy and excited to share what they had written with the class and I built really good relationships with this class. I think overall I didn’t learn a lot in terms of different learning approaches and the different difficulties individual learners face but nonetheless I really enjoyed teaching this bunch of girls.