EDN4100 Critical Learning Incident Week 1 & 2 Term 1
Situation: Students had only been back at school for 3 days. Routines were being introduced and high expectations of behaviour were being reinforced. I was teaching my first lesson on my own, as opposed to co-teaching I had been doing in previous days. I had a strong lesson but was really worried about the 40-minute time restriction of the lesson. In previous lessons, it had taken students a long time to transition and get organised. Task: I was introducing scripts to the students, how to read and structure them. I had a great activity planned to organise students into groups that I had learnt from my recent Tribes TLC training. Students were all given and animal on a card which they were to keep to themselves, and then act out the movements of the animal to find their group. I instructed the students that the activity must be done in complete silence to get the full effect, and that they would be moving outside to complete it. However, when students got up they began to talk and do their actions prior to getting outside. Action: I didn’t pick students up on talking while they were moving outside. By the time all students and myself made it outside most were in groups and begun talking. I tried to reinforce the ‘no talking’ rule of the activity but was not effective as most had completed it already. Result: Thus, students most likely didn’t enjoy the activity as much as I hoped they would. Next time I would bring them back to their seats once they began to speak whilst walking outside and get them to try again. Or, I would move the class outside before handing out the animal cards to avoid the transition. I was so focused on time and trying to actually get some content covered in the lesson, I was not strict in enforcing the routines which needed to be done at this time of the year.