Planning & Scheduling - Being Flexible & Listening To Your Students

The importance of scheduling classes as a teacher is imperative to ensure you a can follow your plan to a certain degree. In your planning you need to cater for flexibility in different and new topics or a time to revisit these topics to reduce confusion in the students learning. Making the children aware of the class schedule for each day can create a good foundation for understanding class timetables and make this area less daunting when they progress to secondary school.

Although planning is very important you need to be adaptable. Making sure that you aren't acting rigidly that needs to stick to designated timeslots because your main focus needs to be ensuring the children are learning. Listening to your students in ideas can help guide your own understanding on their views. Your students come to school everyday and as their teacher you need to make sure you create a good relationship to enhance their learning. Teaching isn’t just instructing and feeding knowledge to your students. It’s just as significant to listen to your students ideas and issues they may come across in their learning. To improve your listening skills you can start by building an environment for respect by encouraging your pupils that ‘adults believe they are worthy of being listened to’ (Teaching Technique for Young Children, MacNaughton, G & Williams, G, 2016, pg 117)
I believe this is a vital topic to address as I linked my own experiences in primary school with place thought and past present. I often felt unheard and incapable to complete certain tasks which lead to me not wanting to come to school. As a preservice teacher I endeavour to help students with confusion and listen to their issues to guide them in the right direction.

References

Teaching Technique for Young Children, MacNaughton, G & Williams, G, 2016

 

Giving Children Downtime

Giving children a specific time during the day to focus on being mindful. Meditation and yoga is a great way to give children this opportunity.

Organising and putting in your schedule for children’s down time and wellbeing is extremely important.
It enhances focus, mood, stress levels, decision making and efficiency in handling tasks.
The children would connect with place-thought while doing either relaxation or meditation, the experience of starting the day in the classroom feeling calm will give that place positive thoughts.

What ideas do you have to help your students focus on learning mindfulness habits?

Talking About my Electronic Scrapbook

In my electronic scrapbook I have tried to link facets of teaching and learning that support this process. Most of these pin point the different areas I find important when become an educator for children. The philosophies I have gathered from MacNaughton & Williams, Teaching Making a Difference are informative and give helpful techniques on how to put these areas into practice.


The theme of my slides start with my exploration on critically viewing an instructor at Karate and noting my ideas. Firstly, I notice the ‘positioning of materials and equipment’, ‘Timing of engagement’ and ‘equality for different race and culture’. The instructor is prepared when placing the equipment into position, he considers different aspects such as safety, learning experience, equal opportunity, age and ability. The children connect with having fun in this training facility, linking place-thought as a major aspect of their learning.


After analysing the instructor at Karate, I began to explore the different things I should consider when I become a teacher. A high priority was ‘planning and scheduling’. I began to grow my ideas around structure, such as ‘children’s wellbeing’ and allowing in my plan to give the children downtime in my lesson. I feel that children will learn these organisation skills from their role models and I hope to be one of those teachers that when children connect with past-present they remember these skills for life. 


My third image of myself is how I put teaching into practice. I discovered that ‘listening’
and ‘guiding’ children into making meaning of the different learning topics is imperative. As MacNaughton & Williams clearly state, the way something is facilitated during a class will depend on the process of making children’s learning easier. I strive to have a classroom full of children engaged and generating thoughts and questions, so they connect with learning to be affected. This will allow them to grasp these concepts of making meaning. Listening to your students view on topics enables the teacher to see how different children learn.

Basically I have included different techniques, topics and ideas on the philosophies I believe matters when becoming a teacher.


References

Techniques for Teaching Young Children, MacNaughton, G, Williams, G, 2009, Third Edition Pearson

Interacting with Babies & Toddlers at Placement

My First Experience at Placement 

Before parents and children arrived, I honestly didn't know what to expect. My group and I tried to create a broad range of activity stations by bringing in toys, books and setting up a drawing table. The vast majority of children that arrived were under the age of 1. I found this was a bit difficult when your group is required to cater for ages 0-5yrs. How can you facilitate the activities for such a broad range when there are no toys at our site? I felt as though I was expected to know how to accomplish this task with not enough guidance on how this is achieved. Did anyone else have these thoughts or difficulties? 

I feel like I wasn't the only one in my group who felt a bit over welmed by the situation so as a group we spoke about the different things we can try to make and be creative with to engage with babies and toddlers. The ideas were facilitated by our mentor to guide us in the right direction and we came up with ideas such as water bottles with items inside and home made musical instruments, and to stay with our learning topic of Aboriginal Culture we then thought of things like rain sticks & clap sticks. I think that staying with these sorts of activities allow these ages to interact together. I have also come to the conclusion that placement is a time for pre-service teachers to learn. Going with the flow of things and letting the children decide what they would like to do. Engaging with the parents and building a rapport with them about their experiences and enabling feedback to create an even deeper understanding. 

 

Visit to Bunjilaka Exhibition

Visit to Bunjilaka Exhibition

After my visit to the Bunjilaka exhibition at the Melbourne museum I connected with the story and it affected my learning where I wanted to learn more about the history and culture. I began to watch movies relevant to the colonisation of Australia and the stolen generations, Rabbit Proof Fence being one of them. My initial thoughts and feelings when entering the exhibition were how intense the setting was. The space was dark and gloomy, although it had well lit areas to portray the importance of the story the exhibition was telling. In contrast, I had discussions with a few family friends and they felt like the story was political and could be taken offensively. Especially when talking about Aboriginals being forced to fight in the Vietnam war, controversy was spoken about how the exhibition story tellers said that it shouldn't have been compulsory for Aboriginals as they weren't apart of this particular culture of war. Personally I believe that Aboriginal culture should be recognised as it is the true history of Australia and should be taught in schools. I believe the education should be informative and true knowledge. The teacher should engage children through the connection of place-thought and past-present to understand and grasp concepts effectively. A great exercise to incorporate an interesting lesson is too collect things outdoors and allowing the children the freedom to research certain aspects of their land and they place they live in.

Open Pod Classrooms - Do they really work?

Open Pod Classrooms

Does open pod learning really work efficiently? From the research that I have found, this particular type of learning environment has been used in the past and most information I have come across details that it hasn't worked that well. This is because children would often be distracted and get lost in what they are learning. After speaking to a teacher that currently works in a primary school that uses the open pod learning style, she has shared multiple experiences where children find it hard to concentrate on their tasks. From a teachers perspective, it can be difficult to manage your group if they are doing quite tasks that require no discussion and the other group is doing noisy open discussion. So my question is, why are schools using this open learning style today? Children's learning isn't an experiment, their lives depend on all these early stages of knowledge and making good habits in school. As a pre-service teacher I think that this could work if all groups were conducting classes the same way. This could enhance learning and ideas shared across groups would be the same to reduce confusion and children becoming lost in their learning. It could also generate a more creative approach as learning could be through their social groups as well as from their teacher. I believe that structure and direction is what children need in all ages through primary school to prepare them for secondary school. 

Behaviour Managment - Creating Mutual Respect

How would you establish mutual respect and boundaries in your classroom if some children don't learn this respect at home? If children don't show respect to their parents because they weren't taught at a young age that may cause them issues in school. If these children cause disruption whilst other children are trying to concentrate on their learning. When addressing this issue, you will need to give some children extra help by teaching them this respect. Although will this conclude to the others being neglected in some way? And how will you know if you have done the right thing? How do you manage this? Is it just trial and error?

Safe Schools Program

Safe Schools Program

I believe strongly that schools should have a safe, secure and accepting environment. School is a place where children often seek approval and want to fit in to friendship groups. Many adults in todays society still battle with different forms of mental illness as a result of being bullied in school. Growing as an individual through childhood is what shapes us into the person we are today. The Safe Schools Coalition encourages and provides schools with different resources to ensure that homophobic behaviour is eliminated. After reading on their website I think that this is an excellent program to ensure children are educated in the equality of same sex attracted, intersex and gender diverse students. The program also guides and educates the teachers to prepare them when addressing certain situations appropriately to ensure discrimination is diminished in school settings.

Resource: http://www.safeschoolscoalition.org.au/what-we-do

Direct Instruction in Schools

The structure of direct teaching can be rigid enough to obstruct the creativity of the teacher. There is very little room to improvise because this method follows a step-by-step procedure. How does this allow us to reflect on our teaching techniques and progress as an individual if everything is handed to us? Teaching isn’t just a journey for children and their learning, teachers are learning too. Teachers are always learning to provide the best education and guidance for children. Although, in contrast perhaps direct instruction will guide teachers in providing a high standard of teaching as the specificity of the objectives or learning targets will be easier for teachers to achieve.
According to Good to Great Schools Australia ‘Students are taught carefully sequenced and highly structured lessons and are required to ‘master’ each lesson before advancing on to the next’, does this mean that the method of direct instruction is flawless? What are your thoughts on Direct Instruction?

How would you handle racist behaviour in a kindergarten setting?

How would you handle racist behaviour in a kindergarten setting?

Racism is a form of discrimination and bullying and I completely disagree with children behaving in that manner. Although, how do you tackle trying to educate children around the age of 3-4years that it is completely unacceptable? 

My mum babysits a girl who goes to kinder and she is 4 years old. The kindergarten teacher had a chat with my mum regarding certain incidents of racism during play time. What I understand from the issue is that the little girl's friend (a boy) was instigating racism towards a boy by saying to them they can't play in their group because he has brown skin. The little girl (my mum babysits) copied her friend and chose to copy her friends actions by excluding him. 

What would make a child become racist? Especially at such a young age! 

I then asked my mum the same question. She responded with 'the little boy that instigated the racism said to the African and Indian children that they can't play because his dad said that brown people are stinky'

I was blown away!

How can parents be teaching their children this kind of behaviour.

Does this mean I have to educate parents as well as their children?
And to what extent do I have boundaries of teaching?