Read Part 1.
Every year quite a few or may be all B.Ed and D.Ed students do their training in regular schools for 2 weeks. In my school also 2 weeks are given to these 'students'. Again I pleaded with my senior teacher to leave my class out of this as I was petrified about missing 8 days of teaching. But I was told that I don't have a choice but to give the class to these students to teach.
I had 5 'students' teaching various subjects in my classroom. The first thing most of them did was wishing my kids 'Good morning childrens'. My kids just do not know what politeness is. So immediately some of them have raised their hands and told them, don't say childrens, it is child-children and childrens is wrong. It was just a start, my kids kept correcting them where ever they found a mistake. One teacher asked my kids to give examples of common noun. When one kid said cat, she told my kid that it is a proper noun as it is the name of a particular animal. I was surprised by the confidence of my kids when he started arguing with her that it is not. Finally I intervened and told her that my kid is correct.
They kept making mistakes in their spoken language and in the things they wrote on the board. They struggled to manage my kids as my kids will not sit quiet and listen without doing something on their own. They kept calling one kid at a time to the board to write answers leaving the others with nothing to do. I kept sitting in the class and when they were making mistakes and the kids were not correcting them, I took them aside or told them after the class based on how bad the mistake was and how scared I was that my kids will catch on to that. The 'students' were very responsive to my feedback and I could see that they took in my feedback and changed their English pretty quickly, where ever they could.
I was not sure once they are out of my school whether they will remember all the things and stick to it. These students come with their teachers who observe them and give grades for their teaching. So I met up with their teacher and inquired about their willingness to take feedback from me and pass it on to their students in a more structured manner. She agreed immediately. She has seen me giving feedback earlier to her students and I felt she was a little embarrassed at the kind of mistakes they were making. So I wrote down all the things I observed into 6 major categories - Spoken English, Written English, Content Knowledge, Pedagogic Methods, Assessment Methods and Behaviour Management - with ample amount of examples from the mistakes these student-teachers were making and suggestions on how to improve.
When I handed it over to their teacher, she told me that she will discuss that with her students. That discussion part is indeed something which I cannot control, change. But then I tried turning around missing 8 days of teaching into something I thought might be useful by giving feedback to those teachers.
I tried, I guess that's where I need to stop worrying. The rest is out of my hands.
ps. My favourite teacher from my school is a teacher who taught me for 2 weeks like this when I was in 8th grade, her name is Susan Titus. I am actually still searching for her.
smile :)
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