End Times

So, aside from some marking (creative writing and numeracy), my teaching is finishing for the year.

Mostly, I'm really sad about that. I've had an amazing time at Queenspark, I've learned so much and hopefully have grown as a teacher. I'm going to be writing up some of the things I've been up to during the last month.

Tomorrow is the Junior Sports' Day, which I'll be helping out at and my students will be partipating in. I'm bringing each of them a lollipop, as well as a certficate of some way they have achieved while I was there- that idea was from my host teacher. As a side note, this site is amazing for creating kid-friendly certificates, it was no trouble at all to whip up one for each student. I'll also be bringing her a little gift to say thanks, there is no way I can possibly say how grateful I am but at least it'll be something.

From Monday I'll be back at university, frantically completing assignments and portfolios and research projects. To be honest, I'd rather stay at Queenspark and continue with what I've been doing there- I was honoured to be part of such an amazing team of teachers and staff, if only for such a short while.

Getting Ready for School

You will see a lot of blog entries with this title at this time of the year- Getting Ready for School. As you all know, in the Northern Hemisphere school starts in September. The majority of edu-bloggers are from the US and, as expected, all of the bloggers I follow are discussing classroom layout, parent packs and display ideas.

Here in South Africa, school starts in January. The big summer holiday is December - January, with a smaller (but significant) winter break June - July. This fact also makes a lot of beautiful calendar and planning resources useless to me, they are often decorated and planned seasonally and our seasons are opposite here! Let's see some love for the teachers in the Southern Hemisphere! Gecko at The Red Pen of Doom is a South African teacher, hi Gecko!, but I wonder if there are any more out there? If there are signs of life, maybe we could get a Southern Hemisphere linky-party started.

 The emphasis on starting the school year at the moment is beneficial to my own plans, though- I start my final teaching practice in two weeks! I've met my host teacher and discussed our plan for the first week of term. I'll be at Queenspark School (as usual, not it's real name) for 5 whole weeks. My class, Grade 2 (age 7/8), will be starting third term with me there from the first day. I love this because it helps to cement my authority if I'm there from the 'start'. There are 16 students, with a 50/50 split between those who are home-language English speakers and those who are not. It's my first time in a private school, so I'm excited to see the contrast between Queenspark and Sandlot, which was a well-supported government school.

My host teacher said that she wasn't happy with her current method of classroom discipline, which was grouping rows of desks into teams. This wasn't working for two reasons:

• The students are young and not very assertive, meaning members of Dragonfly Group didn't feel they were brave enough to tell other Dragonflies to be quiet/behave.
• My host teacher often changes the seating plan to accomodate her students' needs.

We discussed this and I mentioned my Clip Chart which had worked so successfully at Sandlot School. The result: I'm going to make another Clip Chart and bring it into my new Grade 2 classroom! I'm excited to have the opportunity to create another Clip Chart so soon, and I hope that my class will like it. I have 1 week before school starts, so with luck I'll have more pictures up here of Clip Chart #2 soon.

As a side note, I finally realised I didn't have the "Follow My Blog" gadget installed- whoops! If you read my blog, please sign up and follow me. There will be cookies! Virtual cookies.

Whole Brain Teaching - Guff or Great?

In my constant quest for classroom management techniques, I stumbled across Whole Brain Teaching. WBT is a structured classroom management approach which has had great results.

Immediate pros of WBT:

• Structured - The drilling of routines and commands is hugely helpful to students, particularly those in my area of specialisation (pre-school to Grade 3).
• Energetic - the gestures and sillyness of it keep students engaged, which is very difficult to do
• Free - The materials (videos, articles and ebooks) are all free. They aren't trying to make money from educators. I was able to legally read their primary manual this weekend.
• Easy to understand - By this, I mean that the many Youtube videos demonstrating WBT in the classroom are hugely helpful in seeing the techniques work in practice. Their techniques are not complicated and I feel any class I go to could use them.
• Flexible - WBT seems as if it could work on students of many age groups, the founder of WBT uses his techniques on college-age students.

Immediate cons of WBT:

• Their explanations of 'why' their techniques work feel very pseudo-sciency. The fact that it is named Whole Brain Teaching, to start with, makes many student teachers I talk to skeptical. I don't need to buy into their 'reason' for why tightly-executed, entertaining classroom management works, but still. I don't feel completely comfortable with using a system that may be based on pseudoscience- see Brain Gym.
• By watching all of those WBT videos, I saw that often the students seem robotic/hypnotised. The Youtube comments tend to agree with me, though they are definitely not a source of real insight. You see students who are watching the teacher, following and matching her actions and even voice patterns correctly. It looks eerie, at times, from the outside. 

I've thought a lot about using WBT as the method of improving my classroom management during my next placement at a school, which is happening in about a month or so.

Obstacles to using WBT in my placement

The biggest one would be my host teacher. They might be fine with the idea of me using WBT, but not willing to use it themselves. The inconsistency might not let WBT work, it needs to be used daily. Alternatively, they might hate the idea entirely and not let me use it- which is totally their right as the head honcho.

Another is that I wanted to incorporate WBT into my research project, which I have to frame around, "How can I...?". My idea was to phrase it as, "How can I use WBT techniques to improve my classroom management". The concern is, though, that is WBT hasn't got many specific academic studies which were done on it (I've found one so far, and it was published in a WBT manual so might not even count). If it fails I may not have much of a research project. On the upside, perhaps it could make it a very interesting topic to present!

My Month at Sandlot

So, tomorrow is my last day at Sandlot School. I've bought a lollypop for each of my kids and some cake for the staffroom to mark the occasion. Various teachers have been bringing all sorts of yummy treats for break to share with us because of their birthdays, so I felt like I should participate in some way.

I'm going to miss it terribly. I have my moments why I wonder why I picked such an exhausting career option, but it also feels good to be good at something. My host teacher was ill for two days this week so I had the students all to myself- it was rather hectic but good to get a picture of what goes on when you're on your own. 

Some of the things I loved about my placement at Sandlot School:

• Bonding with the students, being able to help them when they were upset and celebrate with them when they were happy. Listening to their crazy, funny and heart-breaking stories of their lives (real and imagined).
• Teaching! Explaining interesting things to my class. Encouraging them to work better. So much that they do in Grade 1 is fun, and I feel so happy when a student understands something new.
• Having the privilege of working with such wonderful teachers and staff. They really made me feel included in the faculty, which meant more than they may have realised.
• Being able to watch my host teacher and share her classroom. She's such an amazing teacher, the students respect her and she uses that opportunity to teach them valuable things.
• The camaraderie with my two fellow student teachers, sharing the many gripes about the PGCE and school experiences with them. 
• Introducing the behaviour clip chart and seeing the students actually respond to it. 

The kids are what really fascinate me about teaching at the moment. They also exhaust me! It's worth it, though, to hear about what they dreamed about last night or helping them build a superhero costume out of paper (I had an Iron Man and Dragonfly in my class, to name but two).

I've got a file due at the Education Department tomorrow afternoon, detailing my experiences. I'm not asked to write a reflective piece or anything though, so my many anecdotes will have to wait for Monday when I can share them with my other PGCE-ers.

Week 2 at Sandlot School

Since May 7th, I've been working as a student teacher at Sandlot School (not it's real name). I'm assigned there for four weeks, in a Grade 1 class. My host teacher is really great, she's been teaching for many years and I'm learning lots from her. During this time, I don't attend regular lectures or seminars on campus, I follow normal 'teacher hours' at Sandlot and follow their lead about how I spend my time there. 99% of the time, I'm in the class, either teaching or assisting. The rest of the time, I'm making photocopies: this is really not a lot of time, but photocopying is an important job as grade 1's go through so many handouts!

The school I'm at is quite small, it reminds me of the school I was at for matric/grade 12. It only takes a certain number of grades and there is no uniform. I have 23 in my class, with a slightly higher number of girls than boys. There is a very large isiXhosa home-language group in the class, but all of them speak very good English (it's an English-medium school) and I can make myself understood to all of them. I find classroom management the hardest thing to crack, but try to remind myself that it is not my class. My teacher has trained them well, they listen to her requests (most of the time!) but my voice will often be ignored. The class doesn't have a set behaviour system, my HT prefers not to use one- she just praises/discourages as she feels. This makes it more difficult to step into her shoes, but she has presented me so well to the students and for the most part they try their best.

Right now, my only main complaint is that I feel that I'm constantly juggling. I have lesson prep to do for teaching every day, assignments and essays for my PGCE work, and resources to create for my PGCE coursework. On top of that, I'm supposed to keep a special record of everything I do on teaching practice, keep track of 4 students in my class specifically, save all the work I teach, etc. I get overwhelmed a lot, and when I get home from school I am sometimes so exhausted that I can't do anything except nap and zone out for a while- I then feel guilty for this later. Every time I relax or have fun (or do something that isn't work), I feel bad because I feel that I should be working instead.

I feel that I can't be as good as a student teacher as I can be because of this heavy load of work constantly weighing on me. Many of our essays I feel are unnecessary and just busy-work to prove we've been to lectures, which I have been. The teaching practice file is not too much work, but the fact that it's being checked twice during this 1-month period is stressful and I find that I'm having to make time just to make printouts of things and put them into this file, so that they can be checked on.

Something they never mentioned about this course is how much money you will spend on printing, building resources, and laminating. There is so much printing I've had to do so far, and so much more to come. All of my resources need laminated, which isn't cheap. I also have no printer at home and no colour-printer at school, so it is a mission to get this done. Trekking 25 minutes on foot to print something does not make me feel more fondly towards it having to exist in the first place.

/rant

On the upside, I love being in a class with students. I find them generally delightful, and I'm going to miss them terribly at the end of my month at their school. I've (nearly) learned all of their names after the first week, and they've been drawing me pictures and wanting to know more about me. Generally, they are a sweet bunch. Due to the teaching practice portfolio, I have to track four of them, but I'm interested to see how they all develop over this month.