I had a really good two week practicum at Rutland Senior Secondary in Kelowna. It was a really great school and I had two awesome and very laidback sponsor teachers. My PE sponsor teacher must, in a not very distant way, be related to Tate (a PE prof here at UVic) and my English sponsor was the school heartthrob and football coach. Both teachers had a very laidback approach to lesson planning and teaching, putting 2.5 hour lessons together in the 5 minutes before class. Rutland has 2.5 hour blocks - 2 classes each day, 4 classes in a term, just alternating A/B. I think the biggest battle most of the teachers faced was trying to keep students engaged for such a big chunk of time. But I got to teach To Kill a Mockingbird with English 10, which was really neat because I've never had the practical classroom experience in English that I've had in PE. Very interesting to see how much diversity is in a classroom and to try to reach everyone. In PE I taught the first couple lessons from an ultimate frisbee unit, which was really fun and I got to teach "trick" throws (hammer, air bounce..) so the students were pretty into it. All in all, I had a really good time and feel like it was such a valuable experience coming into Pro Year and the big practicum to get a feel of what schools and teaching is actually like and to get a lot of ideas for what to do and what not to do.
But one of my big questions that came out of this experience was what do you (sorry, this is pretty PE oriented) think of combined classes? During my practicum PE classes were combined so there would be 60+ students and two teachers. I found it very chaotic and there was always a large chunk of time spent on little classroom management things that I felt could be avoided if it was just the 30 students from each class. Also, they would have all the students in the one gym and because it was two crazy for everyone to be playing at once, half the class would sit out half the time. I'm sure there are many benefits but I feel like it's best just for certain units and not for every single class. Ideas?
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Taryn,
ReplyDeleteI couldn't even imagine planning for 2.5 hours of either P.E. or English!!! Did you switch up your lessons half way through? Did you use any techniques to keep the students engaged?
I'm curious to know how the P.E. teachers split up their time/ work when they combined their classes. I struggle with what could possibly be the advantages with this sort of set up. I definately agree that classroom management would be a lot simpler if there were only 30 students to monitor and control compared to 60! We are continually told to create the most amount of playing time for each student and this just doesn't seem to be the way to do it. Sounds like you had quite the practicum experience!