Practicum - Day 1

My first practicum round. Practicum is time in schools when we have to plan and give lessons and then we get marked on our performance by our supervisors. Its different from fieldwork in that the latter is more about observation and ungraded. We had three days of fieldwork at our practicum schools to get used to the schools and sort out requirements and expectations. As I was sick last week, I missed one of my fieldwork days when I was supposed to have meetings with my practicum supervisor and coordinator to sort all this stuff out.

I'm in the primary half of a small P-11 private Christian school that is somewhat more conservative than the state schools in the area. Behaviour and uniform standards are stricter and the kids seem more respectful and better behaved; I'm not sure if this is because of the Christian bias, or because parents are paying for education and thus more likely to enforce standards at home, or a mixture of the above.

On the weekend I had an online tutorial assignment to do about "connectedness" and "engagement" within middle schools (yrs 5-9). Lois Irving talks about three types of teaching: delivery, modification and collaboration. Delivery is the teacher centred chalk and talk style of teaching where the students are told what they need to be learning and expected to fit in with the teacher's requirements. Collaboration takes this curricula and tries to make it more applicable to the students interests and needs, but the teacher is still deciding what and how learning will take place whereas collaboration occurs when students and teachers decide together on learning styles and outcomes and multiple intelligences are catered to.

Last week and today, my practicum supervisor, lets call her Rebecca, seemed to spend a great deal of time focussing on the kids behaviour and telling them what they "need" to be doing. She seems to spend a large proportion of the day being somewhat critical and rarely praises kids behaviour with any real enthusiasm. She hasn't been teaching all that long, but already seems somewhat burnt out. It seems like she's teaching more with a delivery style when she's tired and just wants to get through the day.

I left Japan - and I forget this on the days I really miss the place (like always) - because my patience had run out, and I was finding my cute little kids and my sweet old ladies, really annoying. I think burn-out might be a natural process of teaching, and maybe as a society we need to find a way for teachers, after a few years teaching, to be able to leave the system for a year or two and slot straight back in when they are ready. But instead, we reward teachers for long service. Isn't it better to have teachers who are fresh and reinvigorated?