Goal Two

At the beginning of practicum, I found it difficult to create relevant learning intentions and success criteria but as time went on I became more confident, although I still have work to do in this area. I feel I’m now more competent at creating learning intentions and success criteria, but I need to focus more on sharing them with the children, both at the beginning and the end of the lesson. I did try to do this, but I found myself focusing on what I was teaching and I would remember to mention the success criteria too late in the lesson.

An area I want to focus on is introducing the learning intention to the children, then developing the success criteria with them. I also need to make sure that when I am using the whiteboard, that I write the success criteria up early (or before the lesson) so that the children are aware of what they need to be doing from the beginning and are able to check in while they are working on their lesson.

I now have a greater understanding of how the levels in the curriculum work in reality in a classroom. I think that I may have been pitching my lessons at too high a level. I was in a Year Three class and was using level two for most lessons. Towards the end of practicum, the other teacher in my class explained that Year Three children should be working at level two by the end of the year. I think this is probably particularly relevant given the additional pressures that Covid has added this year, with remote learning and additional stress for children. Speaking with the teachers in my class, they said that there was a wide variety of work done while children were learning remotely, some leapt ahead with additional focus from parents and others stayed the same or slipped back, depending on what they were able to do from home and how the individual child reacted to lockdown and their personal situation.

A realisation that I have had during this practicum is how little teaching time there is in each school day. There are start of day classroom routines, morning and lunch breaks, singing, sport, library visits, transitions between lessons (and handing out books) and end of day pack-up (which can take 20 minutes once all devices and desks are cleaned to post-covid standards).

This realisation helped me understand that I was trying to fit too much into each lesson, so I have been making an effort to decrease the content I cover in each lesson. This means there is more time to go over learning intentions and success criteria and cover what is in the plan, rather than getting part-way through the lesson or going way over time. Over the last two weeks I also started setting a timer so I could keep better track of the timing of my lessons, as I was struggling with this. I should have started timing my lessons earlier, as I found it made a huge difference. It also reiterated the importance of flexibility to me – sometimes a lesson can run over slightly if something important is being realised or discussed, and it’s also okay to stop a lesson when it’s not running effectively, and start from that point the following day.

While I was assessing the children during my lessons, I didn’t have much opportunity to observe the individual assessment that the teachers do for each child, which links to the children’s individual goals. Sometimes the teachers would set a maths or reading test that would need to be completed by a particular time and this would be analysed to see what knowledge the child had. There were some instances where one child would help another child with one of these tests (the classroom had a lovely collaborative working style, both between the teachers, and the children) which is something I would need to be aware of, particularly in a collaborative environment with devices, which means it can be difficult to see exactly what each child is doing.

The Design for Learning standard (Education Council New Zealand | Matatū Aotearoa, 2017), has made me think about how important it is to be aware of how different children learn and what is appropriate for each individual. While I don’t think it’s possible to design an individual lesson for each child (for a beginning teacher at least, although my Year One teacher had 14 different reading groups), I think it is important to have an understanding of how each child learns and what style of learning they respond to.

During one lesson, a child wasn’t contributing to a maths lesson on fractions and was trying to meld into the background. I used questioning to see if I could understand their thinking and realised that the concept was confusing for them. As the lesson was coming to an end, after I dismissed the group I asked if they’d like to sit down and go over it again. We looked at it from a different perspective and the four or five minutes I spent with them individually was enough for them to understand the concept. It was great to see the child at the next lesson confidently using the knowledge they’d gained and building on it. They made me a card a few days later which said “Thank you for teaching me, I enjoy it when you teach me”, which made me realise the value of the four or five minutes of individual time.

I also made a point of spending individual time with a child who has some behavioural problems and as a result is sometimes on the receiving end of negative attention. I spent time discussing their writing and maths tasks with them during ‘walk-around’ times, helping them to focus and clarify their thoughts and encouraging them. I made a point of giving them positive attention and highlighting what they were doing well. While it didn’t have a major impact on their general behaviour (and I wouldn’t expect it to as it was only a short time), they did focus well afterwards and generated some good writing.

I’ve learnt that making sure that the children know what they need to do to be successful and me understanding if they have been successful or have some gaps that need to be filled is key when planning learning. If I don’t know what the child has learnt, and they don’t know what they’re meant to be learning, we can’t have a successful learning relationship. Providing feedback to the child so they know how they are doing and being able to delve more deeply into a lesson if required or move on if the group has a good understanding is key when designing learning.