Professional Practice 3

102605 Secondary PP Community Engagement

Self Reflection Form

Pre-service Teacher Details

Pre-service Teacher Name: Pre-service Teacher ID:
Joanne Zeaiter 19862415

Pre-service Teacher Phone Pre-service Teacher Email Address:

Number: 19862415@student.westernsydney@edu.au
0450 255 480 / joannezeaiter@hotmail.com

Placement Details: If you haven’t complete 60 hours face to face you must
provide a detailed statement of how your experience meets the outcomes
for Professional Practice CE. Attach evidence.

Placement Name: Delany College Placement Phone Number: 8633 8100

Placement Address: Grimwood St, Placement Email Address:

Granville NSW, 2142 Delany@parra.catholic.edu.au

Contact Person: Kata Collimore

Describe in 500 WORDS any features and benefits of the setting you attended.
Consider number of students, location details, age of students, types of educational
programs offered and any other salient aspects of the experience. Consider how this
experience will contribute to your development as a beginning teacher.

AITSL Standards

The criteria for pre-service teacher reflection focus, the first, second, third and
sixth standards.
• 1.3 Students with diverse linguistic, cultural, religious and socioeconomic
backgrounds
• 1.5 Differentiate teaching to meet the specific learning needs of students
across the full range of abilities
• 2.2 Content selection and organisation
• 3.1 Establish challenging learning goals
• 6.3 Engage with colleagues and improve practice

2
Reflection:

Delany College is a school setting situated at Grimwood St, Granville NSW (Western
Suburbs) with approximately 330 students. This is a secondary school with students ranging
from the ages of eleven to seventeen (years 7 to 12) and consists primarily of diverse
children with a language background other than English (EAL/D).

There were many surprising pedagogical aspects that the Delany College community setting
implemented within their learning space. As a beginning teacher, this school allowed me the
opportunity to observe a unique and innovative learning system that may be seen more in
the future. This school had recently begun to use a collaborative space approach to the
classrooms which created an open learning system. As I have never been exposed to this
method of teaching during my university experience (which has primarily been traditional
classroom practices), Delany’s learning system was certainly a surprise. There were sixty
students per class who were taught by three teachers simultaneously in large learning areas.
Although there were some challenging aspects to this open learning, the benefits were that
students had more opportunities to have individual time spent with a teacher. This allowed
me to subsequently concentrate on helping the students who needed the most assistance.

I engaged with research about the various communities in which I would be interacting with
before I commenced. This meant that I could properly reflect standard 1.3, as I asked for
information about the refugee students I would mostly be working with. It was important
that I had a clear understanding about the different ways in which these students learn. This
was convenient through the open learning space as it allows for teachers to share
responsibilities within the classroom. It was evident that this system enabled a better focus
on standard 2.2, being “content selection and organisation” (AITSL, 2018). It is easy to
analyse student needs when there are multiple teachers to discuss what strategies to
implement depending on the student and create diverse collaborative tasks amongst the
students.

This learning experience presented me with the opportunity to set personal goals as to
improve on my practice and awareness as an educator. I wanted to understand how to
teach refugee/special needs students and learn the effective strategies which I can
implement within my future classrooms. This was accomplished as I closely worked with
students as a teacher’s aide, meaning that I was specifically able to concentrate on learning
how to best explain and reiterate the differentiated tasks to students who had difficulty in
learning the content (standard 1.5).

Although I worked with a variety of teachers in different subject areas, I was given the
opportunity to work in classrooms of my key learning areas including Music and English. Due
to this, one of the standards which was reflected within my time at Delany College includes
6.3 which states that teachers should “engage with colleagues and improve practice” (AITSL,
2018). I was hence able to both learn and contribute my own ideas as the teachers often
gave me freedom to step outside the ‘teacher’s aide’ role.

To conclude, I believe that this experience taught me various important lessons about the
teaching profession which I will be able to use as to influence my own pedagogical practice
to be inclusive and equitable.