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