The 5 teaching strategies that I aspire to implement during my EDN4100 practical placement in 2020 include:
Management of the Classroom - Having ways to promote student engagement while also having strategies to defuse conflicts that may arise in the classroom. I wish to create a classroom environment where a large portion of my behaviour/classroom management is proactive rather than reactive, if I create a learning environment and rules/routines cooperatively with the students, I will be using more proactive behavioural management than reactive.
Instructing students in rules and procedures. As this placement is being undertaken at the start of the year I believe this is an extremely important strategy to consider, and as mentioned above, I hope that putting proactive strategies into place will limit my need for implementing reactive strategies/consequences. With new students to the school/classroom and students that have been on holiday for a long time, it is imperative that they are reminded of the rules and procedures relevant to the school, and that these are consistently reinforced over the first two weeks of the school year.
Questioning - Providing students with questions that promote higher-level thinking rather than the standard questions that only require yes or no answers, as well as using questioning as a major contributor to Professional Standard 1 – knowing students and how they learn, questioning will become pivotal in building and maintaining relationships with students, parents and my mentor teacher.
One-On-One direct teaching. During the two-week placement, it is important that I get to know the students and how they learn, which I aim to do through implementing the above strategies. Once I have a base understanding of students and how they learn, I will be able to begin providing students that require extra support the chance to get more direct instruction from the teacher, supporting them accordingly to achieve their potential and meet learning goals set in the first week.
Implement Cooperative learning strategies. I believe that allowing for students to work collaboratively, allows for those more capable to assist other students, further strengthening their learning, and for those less capable students to learn from the gifted & talented students, allowing them to build upon their knowledge and form deeper understandings. For example, through icebreaker activities in the first week, small-group work, think-pair-share, whole-class activities etc.
During Placement
During the initial two-week placement experience undertaken in a Year 2 classroom, I was able to implement each of the 5 above strategies through the guidance of my mentor teacher, examples and evidence are as follows:
Management of the Classroom - To promote the management of the classroom we implemented the whole-school rewards system, "purple tokens" which are awarded to students based on the four school expectations, these go into a draw every 2 weeks at assembly where select students are drawn out at random and receive a prize, this encourages students to behave respectfully and retain focus and effort on their school work. As well as this, I implemented a stamp chart, where once one student in the classroom reaches 10 stamps, there is a whole-class reward which could be; cupcakes/treats, 15 minutes of games/sports/meditation etc. This encourages students not only to do the right thing for themselves but to participate as a team and encourage one another to behave accordingly, at the end of the two-week placement, students were beginning to hold themselves and each other accountable for behaviours. For undesired behaviours, we had a class number chart, where students were given a warning for their behaviour, before moving up the number chart, if they reached number 3, they were to go to a buddy-class to complete work.
Instructing students in rules and procedures - As this placement was during the first two weeks of the school year it was of high importance to instruct the classroom in rules and procedures and implement these explicitly, ensuring feedback and positive reinforcement was administered. On the very day in the very first lesson as a class we ran through the school's four expected behaviours, this was reinforced explicitly to students. As well we ran through the classroom specific expectations, by first questioning students "what makes a good student" "what makes a good listener" "what makes a good worker etc" - these were written on the small portable whiteboard and were then rephrased into classroom expectations.
Questioning - I constantly utilised questioning as I intended to, providing questions in their worksheets that required a more in-depth answer than a simple yes or no response. Often I would pose open-ended questions to students that needed assistance to help move their thinking in a way that would help them find the answer rather than giving them the answers. The image provided below is an example of the questions I used when creating worksheets to encourage higher-order thinking and mathematical reasoning in both number sentences and written form taken from a Mathematics re-teach lesson which was used as a diagnostic assessment for students capabilities in simple number addition/subtractions and representing data through tallying and graphing.
One-On-One direct teaching - I administered one-on-one direct teaching in several instances, becoming responsible for the low achieving mathematics group in my classroom when co-teaching which contained 5-6 students, as well as taking the lower writing group consisting of 6-8 students (rotated in groups of 3-4). It was in this small group setting that I was able to deliver the content more explicitly having a more one on one chance to teach the students at their ability level, which in turn provided me with valuable information and assessments of the students level, where they required support, and how to best implement differentiation to cater for them in my own lessons.
Implement Cooperative learning strategies - On the very first day, the desks were organised into groups to promote social interaction and group work. With tables of 12 and 13 in two rows of two (with desks facing into each other). Many of the tasks we provided the children promoted group discussion and so having the tables laid out in this format made these discussions easy and conducive to student interaction and learning. In addition to this when the students were sat at the mat we introduced a common theme amongst the discussions where the students would quickly pair up and take turns discussing the ideas being taught, identified as "turn & talk" promoting their engagement and breaking up the teacher's constant instructions. Small STEM activities were implemented during the practice, with myself conducting two over the two weeks, allowing students to work cooperatively to problem solve. This provided me with essential information on the leaders, the loafers and which students worked effectively, fairly and actively in team scenarios.