Lessons Learned in the Classroom

Spending time learning in an Elementary School classroom was invaluable in my education to become a teacher. I was faced with new challenges every single day. Each challenge that I was presented with enabled me to learn a multitude of lessons. Moreover, emulating the teaching styles of excellent and experienced educators allowed me to gain confidence and to grow into my own personal teaching style. Some of the challenges I faced included behaviour management, creating good assessment tools, and adapting lesson plans.

When developing behaviour management strategies, I found that preventative strategies were by far the best method. This includes developing an inclusive classroom environment, setting expectations and being consistent with consequences, and strategically planning the daily activities. For example, after nutrition breaks and gym, the students need a cool-down period in order to re-focus. This means that we would spend at least ten minutes doing a quiet activity such as silent reading before jumping into a lesson plan. Without this cool down period, it was almost guaranteed that students would have a difficult time focusing and were much more likely to act out.

Creating assessments that were valid and reliable was much more difficult than I expected. The first test I created for the students was way too difficult, not in what was being asked but in the way it was presented. Most students felt intimidated by the length of the test and struggled to answer any questions. I had mistakenly thought that putting many multiple choice questions along with the short answer questions would help students by giving them more chances to show their knowledge. After realizing my mistake, I re-created an assessment that was much shorted and had very few questions but assessed the same criteria. All of the students improved their mark from the first test to the second one. Moving forward, I will be sure to take into consideration the formatting of my assessments when creating these assessment tools.

In teaching, things rarely go exactly as you planned. One perfect example of this was when the internet in the school wasn't working. I had originally planned for the students to complete an assignment on Google classroom, however that was no longer a viable option. Luckily, I was able to exchange this lesson with another lesson I had prepared for the next day. Teachers need to be able to adapt their lessons at the last minute, so this means being prepared in advance.