Professional Practice Exploration

Wyn Priscilla Teo 21443007

Reflections on Week 1 : 18- 22 August 2014

The week has been extremely valuable to me as I received a lot of
feedback on my lessons from different teachers- my mentor teacher, my
supervisor and 2 relief teachers. The positives were that I had a good
approach, planned well, had good usage of ICT and that my lessons and
activities were interesting and engaging.
The development areas were that I needed to make sure everyone
was paying attention during critical points of the lesson. I am now starting
to be more observant of any lack of attention among the students. I also
learnt to better control and minimise disruptions and cheeky behaviour; it
does not work well to ask the student if he or she would like to sit next to
me . The more effective way was to be firm and offer him/ her a choice of
alternatives do this or, explain the consequences of the undesirable
behaviour and follow-through.
Another key takeaway for me was that students respond well to
familiar cues. As the week went all, the students and I felt more at ease
with each other. I soon learn that the usage of certain familiar phrases
such as 10 hurry up, 9 hurry up.. meant that points might be taken away
for the slow ones. Clapping and saying Year 3s , worked better in getting
their attention than saying boys and girls or putting hands on the head
and hoping that they would notice.