Reflection - Week 4 Term 1

What an exciting week - evacuations, observations and too little time!

We have almost completed all of our assessments and I have finally found the time to catch up those students who were absent or out of class. It is very difficult to meet all of the students needs when you often don't have a full class and you are trying to catchup those who missed out - this is something that I will need to work on managing.

I have found a lot of areas through the assessment of the students in my class that there are a lot of areas (especially in writing) that need addressing. In the next week or so I am going to look at establishing more groups and beginning to address these needs.

Keeping calm seemed to be a theme that stood out for me this week. Whether it be in my observation with Gail Loane (where I received some very useful feed forward) or during the impromptu evacuation (where we all had not much idea of what was going on) I have learnt that it is important to keep calm and not to show the students or others that you may not have a clue what you are doing.

This week the students began setting up their own individual blogs. This was quite a challenging session for me as I am only just getting to know how to use blogger myself. I think that this will be an area where I am going to learn a lot from the students as when they explore and discover they will find things out that they are able to teach myself and others within the class. This is a good opportunity for me to give some responsibility to the Year 8 students, allowing them the chance to take more of a leadership role and to help the Year 7's.

I still feel that a lot of the lessons that I am planning are too much work for the blocks of time that are available. So one of my goals for next week will be to keep things simple and to teach a small section of a topic well.

Next week will be a week of a lot of professional development through the First Aid course and a trip to Takapuna Normal School, so I am looking forward to learning as much as possible.