Professional Experience

Hi

I am going on prac next week for three weeks. I love going on prac. The more time i spend in a classroom the more i realise that i was right to choose this as a career and the more i can put theory into practice. The reasons for telling you this is that after posting comments on Anita's blog and responding to her comment here, i wanted to elaborate a bit more on the subject of relationship building.

We are taught that one of the most important and crucial things to establish within a classroom is trust. I don't just mean in regards to the teacher/student realationship either (although this is a very important one). Others include student/student, school/student and community/student. Once this trust is established proper relationships can be built and fantastic learning opportunities present themselves. For a prac student this all needs to be done in either a two or three week time period. In addition, pre-service teachers are also trying to learn their own craft as well i.e planning, research, collaboration techniques and everyday teaching skills.

For some of the students in the class it can also be very distracting. They are not sure how to deal with an individual who has different teaching methods to what they may be used to. I concede this change happens every year, but that is always decided and planned by the school community.

I do not know if there is a solution to the problem of creating trust in a classroom during prac. I know one of the main tips i can give is the first thing i do is learn all the students names very quickly. It is a essential part of a pre-service educators learning to experience the classroom and develop their own pedagogical practices. Therefore developing the right tools to engage with the students is imperative.

I look forward to any thoughts you may have.


On another completely different subject, i am following Kathryn's blog which is really good and very informative (thank you Kathryn) and i thought i would add the Siftables link here as well.
I believe that i have now shown this to over ten people, both in and out of education. I am in agreement with Kathryn that i would love to be able to play with these myself. As David Merrill does state that we are on the cusp of a new evoulution in technology, to make them easier and far more user friendly. The educational value of this is enormous.

Cheers

Al