Reflection: Week 4

Another week over and only 3 more weeks to go!!!!

What worked well:

Over these last couple of weeks I have really felt completely confident and competent in my teaching. I also feel that my supervising teachers have complete confidence in me and have given me the independence and total control with the units and classes that I am teaching.

This week I met with the teacher-librarian to discuss helping my year 11 Modern History class with their research. She was very helpful and I am sure the students will benefit a great deal from the tips she can give them on researching their individual Cold War topics.

I taught a very effective lesson to my year 11 Modern History class on how to evaluate Internet websites. I believe they found the information very relevant and useful. I started the lesson with asking the students whether or not gossip magazines or gossip blogs are reliable. I had the students look up some examples such as martinlutherking.org and research the publisher stormfront, I went through the reliability of wikipedia.org and looked at the recent issues with John Howard. I then had the students evaluate a Cold War website using an evaluation checklist handout. I believe the students were attentive and engaged. I then taught this same lesson to the year 11 Ancient History class and the students were once again engaged.

I had a few bahavioural issues with students this week. One girl was sucking on a lollipop at the start of class and I asked her to put it away, which she did and then I turned around again and she had it back in her mouth, I had another student making some strange sound with his phone, which was distracting other students, and finally a student who hit another student on the head with a textbook. I dealt with all of these students individually and after class.

Needs to improve:

I think at times I find myself having to repeat to the class three or four times "Excuse Me, pay attention to the board" or "Pens down, eyes up." Most of the time the students switch on but a few students want to continue either doing their work or talking to one of their classmates. I think I need to either work on the tone in my voice or simply name the students who are not paying attention or I could list the student who are not paying attention with their names on the board and make that their first warning, second warning is a five-minute detention.