Student: Feichin Brennan

Classes Observed: 2nd year Wood Technology

Date: 26/03/2021

CRITICAL REFLECTION ON INDEPENDENT/TEAM-TEACHING

Innovative Approaches

The last couple of months have been bizarre. I have been online teaching for the whole of the independent teaching experience. I found the
start of the online teaching experience extremely hard because I had no experience at teaching online at all. My biggest problem with teaching
online was the lack of participation. In my very first pre-recorded lesson, I got zero responses. My Co-operating teacher had warned me not to
expect many responses as the 2nd years in general were poor at attending all online class. I found that the experience for me was very
disheartening. I initially thought that maybe my lesson and work had not uploaded but my co-operating teacher confirmed that my lesson had
uploaded. In result of having zero participation, I did not let it get me down, but it made me work harder to try new ways to try get the students
involved with the lesson. Previously I felt my video was too long, so I decided for the next lesson I cut my video by 10 minutes shorter. What also
arose from my previous lesson was the lack of active resources. Having analysed my previous resources, I decided to use Padlet and Microsoft
forms quizzes to make my class more active and fun. “Participation frameworks can help explain how learners do or do not become part of
mutual engagement within a classroom setting” (Hansen-Thomas, 2009). Participation began to rise in the next couple of weeks and I think it is
because the class began to realise that there is lots of engagement in my class. Having the same students each week allowed me to analyze how
my teaching was coming across and how the students were learning. A big thing was the assignments tabs in the microsoft teams app. I found
the students would not engage with the content unless they had a due date on their work. My expericence with assigments came the hard way.
I didn’t use them in my first lesson and had zero content uploaded.I began setting out a plan to use assigments and to see if the class would
engage and participate more. I now know that students will work better with a due date.

Professional Realionships

I found that throughout my time in the school all the teachers and staff were very welcoming and very helpful. If I asked for anything I was given
it almost straight away. For me this was very meaningful as some teachers went out of their way to help me. Subsequently, Im not sure if it is
because there is a lot of young teachers who all know how dawnting it is going out on their first experience of teaching or if they just want to be
helpful in general. One expericence I had was when the principal had already created an school account for me to access all the computers and
online teams. For me this was so thoughtful, it shows how much he is ahead of the game and how prepared he is as a principal. He could see
things coming before anyone else and I think that’s what makes him a great principal. What arose from this experience for me is to be as
prepared as best as possible. What I learned from my realionship with the principal is how important it is to be able to communicate clearly with
students and teachers. I also learned that I need to be prepared to communicate in different ways to include different cultures and learning
abilities. “differences in culture present potential obstacles in communication and they must be taken into account in order to communicate
clearly and efficiently.” (Kuzio, 2014). I have a very professional relationship with my co-operating teacher as we organize a professional phone
call each week to discuss what we are doing in the classroom. Having these professional calls, I now realize how important it is to communicate
with all the different teachers especially if there is more than one teacher for each subject. I am not fully confident that my communication skill
is the best they can be. The only way I can see my communication skills improving is by talking and communicating to different people with
different personalities and learning abilities.

Bibliography
Hansen-Thomas, H. (2009). English Language Learners and Math: Discourse, Participation, and Community in Reform-Oriented, Middle School
Mathematics Classes. INFORMATION AGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Kuzio, A. (2014). Exploitation of Schemata in Persuasive and Manipulative Discourse in English, Polish and Russian. CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS
PUBLISHING .