JOURNAL ENTRY 5The eight week placement at Glendowie College has literally flown by with little time until now for proper reflection on the progress I have made as a student teacher. Goodwyn's article notes that the teaching cycle comprises of planning, teaching and Rosetta Stone Portuguese evaluating. I aim to focus this particular entry on these three areas, combining the influence of my four associates within each area.Goodwyn notes that the planning stage is all about what the student teacher already knows. It is also about the selection of the range of possibilities that have been observed or recommended. Easily this has affected the level of ease or difficulty I have found in planning my lessons.For my junior English class I was given free reign of teaching a poetry unit. No framing was given except that I had to incorporate classical forms such as ballads or sonnets. As poetry is one of my favourite texts I found I could bring into the planning my own resources (including those accumulated on the course) and background knowledge. This made the planning stage much easier and I received a great deal of enjoyment out of it. My associate proved helpful in the earlier stages of planning by lending me her folder for stimulus and recommended good websites for reference. The Head of English also lent me a resource and Rosetta Stone Spanish encouraged me to challenge the accelerate class with Year 11 texts such as Browning.Meanwhile the senior English class was tackling Achievement Standard 3.4 with the visual text of 'O Brother Where Art Thou'. Luckily I was familiar with the film and also a teaching unit had been purchased by the school which helped guide my planning. Unfortunately due to time constraints of getting through the material prior to exams I was only able to teach four lessons with this class. The lessons I prepared focused on character and theme. My associate assisted me by suggesting possible tasks such as splitting the class into groups and completing individual character studies which were then presented to the rest of the class.As I am familiar with close reading film and also poetry texts I found the planning for these classes enjoyable and less intensive as for my other two classes, media and drama.The planning stage is definitely made easier if one knows what they are teaching! Unfortunately my knowledge of the development of the documentary genre was zilch and I had to complete some quick study over the weekends prior so I felt confident enough to teach the material to the students the following week. Without visual resources to back up my explanations of the modes of documentary I felt the planning for these lessons extremely challenging. Especially as it was quite dull material on technological developments. I felt that given more time to become acquainted with the material I could possibly have come up with better planned lessons that would engage the students more. Instead they were left with a jigsaw activity, a cloze activity and a group matching activity which ended up being quite confusing. My associate was helpful in the earlier stages by lending me her NCEA booklet on Media which was a great springboard to use. The remaining of my material came from past lecture notes I found over the internet. Unfortunately due to training and other commitments my associate was unable to see most of my teaching of the genre documentary so all of my planning was done independently and I hoped for the best! The other Rosetta Stone English area where I was less familiar with the content was within my drama class. I hadn't observed many lessons so was unfamiliar with the group dynamics and capabilities of the students. Most of my planning was pitched for a more confident class so it ended up being a constant struggle to keep them motivated and their confidence levels up.
