Goal Three

One of the first things I noticed on practicum was the constant communication between the teachers and how flexible they are in the classroom. As the class is co-taught, the teachers plan together. The syndicate does overall planning, deciding on major themes, then the teachers develop their own class plans. The two teachers use a shared google doc which is constantly updated as things change and also used to keep track of incidents in the classroom.

The weeks I was with my class on practicum were busy, including a trip to a Marae on the first Friday which required preparation, additional children in the class for the first two days (so no small group work), a TLIF Day for both teachers in week two, extra work due to Covid 19 (handwashing videos for example) , along with syndicate sports and singing and a library visit and my AT was away sick for the final three days. As practicum was cut short, I didn’t get the opportunity to see a ‘standard’ week, instead I was able to observe how flexible teachers need to be with their planning and execution.

The teachers would often deviate from the planned timetable on the board, either to allow more time to finish something off, add something else in that was needed at short notice or to take into account the needs of the children. They would often have quick discussions during a lesson and make changes to the rest of the day.

When I discussed the planning process with my AT, she said that working as a team makes planning a lot easier as the load is shared. While there was a plan for each subject with what was being taught each day, my AT would often look up resources such as work sheets on the day for specific lessons. An example of this is when we were doing preparation for our Marae trip and learning about the powhiri process, she found a video that explained it then shared it with the class. My impression is that as teachers become more experienced, their written plans become less detailed and more flexible.

As Rubie-Davies et al say, learning is targeted when children are clear about what is being learnt and they have a way of knowing that the learning has been achieved. I liked that my AT shared learning intentions with the class for many lessons, so the children knew what was expected of them and could track their work to make sure they were working towards the success criteria.

I liked that the teachers integrated learning across different lessons. We did work on the poem ‘The Owl and the Pussy Cat’ which included reading (and analysing the poem), writing and art. The children drew an owl in their learning journals before doing a final copy on an A3 copy of the poem. They were told that the owls had to have lots of detail and colour and be large (take up most of the page). Although the children planned their owls out in their journals, many of the final copies didn’t meet the success criteria as they were small, with not much detail or colours. The teachers discussed it and one made the comment that if they were doing maths or literacy, they wouldn’t let them get away with not meeting the criteria, and they decided to get the children to do them again. The finished results were amazing and although it meant additional classroom time was used, it was worth doing again, and the children learnt a valuable lesson about quality of work.

While I didn’t see lots of maths lessons, I enjoyed seeing a variety of different strategies used. There was large group learning which included games using a hundreds board and place value learning on the whiteboard with lots of discussion from the children and a rich task they completed in pairs. In the small group lessons, the children had small whiteboards and I really liked the way the teacher developed each question on the fly, relating them to the children. For example, asking a child their favourite animal or food, then building a question for the group around the answer and discussing their thinking.

There was also a project going on in the class involving ‘Me’ bags, children had decorated a bag and filled it with five items that showed who they are (I think this may have been syndicate-wide). The children presenting their Me bags sat at a table and spoke about their items to approximately seven children, who then moved on to the next person after a pre-determined time. This was a really great project but it ended up being a lot bigger than the teachers anticipated, with 54 children, all enthusiastically speaking about themselves. We had about four sessions while I was there, and it was interesting to see how the process was refined each time. We had more children presenting each time, added a time where the child presenting spoke without anyone touching their items or asking questions and reduced the time everyone had to speak. Each session was more successful as we went on and it showed me the importance of changing lessons if they’re not quite working and thinking about how much time big projects may end up taking.

As the Covid 19 situation developed, more and more children were away from school (only 29 out of 54 attended on the final day), and flexibility around the children’s needs was key. Children knew that something was happening on the last day of school, and were unsettled. The teacher extended free play in the morning on the last day, partly to allow me time to finish an art lesson with some of the children and partly to give the children some extra time without formal learning. Lunchtime was extended while the teachers were having discussions about school closing, after our regular story after lunch, the teacher let the class have a run around the field followed by a play on the playground rather than formal learning. I thought this was a great example of flexibility and taking the children’s needs into account.

I found this goal difficult to work on as there were a lot of ‘non-standard’ days, although this allowed me to see how flexible planning needs to be.