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Professional Competency 8
Professional competency 8 has to do with supporting students’ love of learning. As teachers, we are expected to make learning experiences fun and relatable by incorporating student experiences and cultural identities. It is important to instill a sense of belonging and give them a reason for learning to make the experience of school an enjoyable and healthy relationship.
My development
Throughout my time in the bachelor program, I have always looked for ways of taking the boring, mandatory topics and presenting them in a fun and interactive way that will provide students with a sense of purpose in learning. Throughout my second and third internship, I developed so many of my own unit plans and thus, a huge focus of mine was making sure that students would walk into my classroom excited to learn. I incorporated audio-visuals, gamification, and brain breaks, among other strategies, to help students develop their love of learning English as a second language. I further developed my mastery of this competency by creating fun lessons and activities to teacher my grade 1 students what they needed to learn in an exciting and engaging way. This said, I believe that I still have much to learn since every group of students will respond to things differently. However, since it is something that I have made sure to focus on throughout all my internships, this makes my mastery of this competency at a “thorough” level.
Artefacts
When I completed my second and third internships, I used a lot of kahoot in the classroom with all my groups. I would write the daily agenda on the board with Kahoot at the very end of the class and students would focus so much more on the lesson to make sure they had time to successfully complete the kahoot game. This one quiz made my lessons so much more enjoyable for the students because they really enjoyed the competition that the game created. I would throw in multiple other games and quizzes for students but kahoot is definitely the one they responded to the best and would come into class excited to learn because of that game.
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In completing my fourth field experience and to make sure that my grade 1 students were enjoying my lessons, I incorporated many brain breaks through dance along and dance and freeze songs. We did a dance and freeze when we were talking about Saint-Patrick’s day. We did a season’s dance at the introduction of my lesson about Spring and then ended with a dance along about Spring. This provided them with the fun break that they would need while still choosing a song that was relevant to the topic of the lesson being taught. This is a strategy that worked extremely well with my group and something that I know would not work with every group so it is something I would experiment with in the future to see how students would react.
During my fourth placement, when there are topics that students find boring but still need to be taught, I like to create fun and interactive activities so that they can enjoy themselves. In learning how to count to 100 in various increments, I created 100-days of school posters with various shapes and each shape had a number of stickers they needed to put to successfully complete the task. This activity was done just before the 100-day of school celebration and the students were told their work would be displayed in the school, creating a sense of pride and purpose in the completion of the activity. Furthermore, grade 1 students absolutely love stickers, so using them for the activity made it much more enjoyable for them. Along with this, when I taught a lesson about Spring, I included an interactive activity at the end. I had them do a Spring puzzle scavenger hunt. I hid the puzzle piece throughout the cafeteria and assigned a piece for each to find. Once we had found all of the pieces, students assembled the puzzle. They had so much fun doing this, and each puzzle piece had something that we learned that happens in spring so it was a good closure activity for them.
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