About My Short Practicum

I was placed in a secondary school in Vancouver with approximately 1700 students. My time was divided equally into Math and Mandarin. I have only one school advisor and she teaches both Math and Mandarin. It is amazing that she is fully bilingual with native proficiency in both English and Chinese. There were about 4 or 5 Ministry Designated students, mostly with learning disabilities, in each of her four math classes and only one class has a TA. As a result, the students’ levels vary greatly and the teacher has to spend time managing students’ behaviour. During my visit to the resource center, the teacher there told me that there were about 90 special need students in total and it is only considered an average in the School Board. I have noticed that the teacher had to explain and repeat many times and the students liked to ask such questions about, i.e., the homework, texts, projects, etc, because either they didn’t pay attention or they just wanted to make sure what they understood was correct, even though (to me at least) the teacher had given a very clear instruction (mostly written on the chalkboard) on what they were expected to do,   

I taught two classes in the second week, and one of the main suggestions my SA provided was to have a longer “wait time” for students to get ready, to digest, or simply to make transition. She said it might seem very long when you were standing there, but actually it wasn’t. After, I paid extra attention to her wait time and I found that she gave her students a lot of “wait time” throughout the lessons. “Thinking as a learner, not a teacher” was what she told me and also was what she did in her classroom. I think because she understood her students, she was able to establish very good relations with her students but at the same time she was able to retain her authority in the classroom. And that was why even with a number of special need students, her classes were generally well managed. As mentioned, students’ math skills vary drastically in all of her four math classes, so she had to pay special attention to those students at lower levels. For example, when she let the students work on the word problems, a large proportion of her time was devoted to helping those students individually while other students were working independently.

I observed several other classes, i.e., Socials, English, French and Japanese, in addition to my teaching subjects. To my surprise, most of the classes I’ve observed were largely structure oriented and the activities were rare and were usually arranged at the end of the class. After talking to my friends from other schools, I have a feeling that it seems to be common in practice and I am wondering why. The math classes were usually centered on providing examples and the language classes were mainly about sentence patterns and translation. Some teachers told me that since they were so curriculum driven, they simply didn’t have enough time to do the activities on daily bases, but students did have group projects which were considered activities. Overall, it was a great experience for me and I have learned a lot from my short practicum.