School Experience #1: Week 02

My two weeks at the school have come to a close. Time simply flew by, and before I knew it, I was observing Ms. L's last class on Friday. Since all the classes consisted of students I had already observed in the previous week, I plan on giving just a general overview of the week, but mainly reviewing the two-week experience as a whole.

The biggest challenge for the week was the prospect of giving the layout-focused presentation to the grade 9s, and later on, to the grade 10s. However, as reflected on in detail throughout the last post on this blog, I was quite pleased with the results. All in all, I thought the experience was a necessary one; as much as I have given presentations to students before, they had never been several years younger than me, so I never felt as though I had to mind my level of vocabulary, explain terminology, or feel as though I were teaching something to other people for the first time. The only other times I have had to deal with similar situations were when I did some volunteer work teaching English to small children in underprivileged communities in São Paulo, Brazil. While the content of the classes and the audience of my presentations were drastically different, I still had to manage communicating with people belonging to several generations after my own.

Throughout this internship, some of the reoccurring themes that were brought up in class by Ms. L revolved around confidence, ambition, and reflection. I noticed how younger students (grades 6-8) often did not need much help with confidence, in fact, they were often overly-confident and as a result, did not apply as much time and effort into their work as they should have. To combat this, Ms. L would sit down with them and have them reflect on their outcomes using the rubric she compiled. This not only pushed the students to see which areas they needed to improve on, but calmed them down enough so that they could easily return to their table and continue their project without becoming distracted once again. The conversation would motivate them to reach for more points on the rubric.

Students in grades 9-10 were the most balanced of the classes I observed. They were quiet, but not overly so. Whenever they chatted, it was usually conversation pertaining to the art class. Some of them showed a lot of confidence in their ideas, and with reason, since they were capable of demonstrating a high level of critical thinking and ambition for their project outcomes. At times, they would get distracted, but they easily regained focus if Ms. L pointed this out to them.

Lastly, grades 11 and 12 students were the quietest groups. Because they came to class already knowing what brief they needed to work on, unless Ms. L had an announcement or additional presentation, they would simply sit down and go straight to work. While this demonstrated discipline, Ms. L later admitted that the biggest struggle with older students is motivating them to be more ambitious with their ideas, and to nurture confidence. Since this all takes place in an international school setting, I can speak from experience that, when students have moved between schools across countries, there are gaps in their learning that are very difficult to not only identify, but also fix. Some of these students have very little background in art, and therefore, lack some of the skills other more experienced students already have. Combining these students into one classroom can understandably result in the less experienced student feeling self-conscious of their progress and technical ability. Nonetheless, Ms. L makes a point of explaining that these learning gaps should not deter students from following their interest in art, if anything, it should motivate them to work even harder to reach their full potential within these last two years of school. However, the initial lack of motivation coupled with low confidence can be very challenging to build.

In spite of all these age-specific challenges I observed, Ms. L also spoke to me about how having patience is one of the most crucial aspects of being a teacher. This is a struggle that would be consistent across age groups and skill levels, both in instances where students misbehave and where they need some nudging along to meet the minimum assessment requirements. With particularly troublesome students, Ms. L described a pastoral programme that a school might have in place so that all teachers that teach a particular student are aware of any issues, and can hopefully help steer them in the right direction and make sure they are fulfilling their course requirements. She also described instances where she spoke to other teachers that taught a specific student in order to exchange notes on their experience with the student, and to learn of any strategies the other teacher might have applied to better deal with the student's issues in class. In my opinion, these approaches would mean more teachers are aware of a student's circumstance, and can therefore show more sympathy or patience towards their learning, which can benefit the student in feeling less alone or misunderstood by teachers.

All in all, this experience has been so rewarding. I can't thank Ms. L and Mr. M (the school principal) enough for making all this a possibility and welcoming me back to the school in a new capacity. I feel very grateful for having been able to observe Ms. L's various classes, and I walk away from this experience feeling even more sure of wanting to pursue a career in teaching art! I look forward to future experiences in different school environments, which I'm sure will continue to surprise me and give me more experiences to reflect on. In the meantime, I plan on scanning the detailed notes I took during classes I observed and posting these onto the blog as well! I have also been doing some reading and further research/preparation for my application to PGCE courses, so I intend to write about those here soon.