First day of EPL ...

Image courtesy of Fairfax County Virginia

My first EPL day at my placement was great, all went very smoothly. The school where I am based is quite different to most. It is a small bush school with 12 students, it is a 1 teacher, 1 teacher aide school. I was wondering how 5 different grades could be taught simultaneously without chaos erupting ... quite a skill to develop.

It was very interesting to go into a classroom and observe someone implementing some of the things that I have read about in the last 8 weeks. One thing that stood out for me was the diversity found amongst the student in the classroom. I found that in each of the 5 grades there were many different levels needing to be catered for, my Mentor teacher makes this look easy, which I'm sure I will find out when I teach a lesson is not!

I was keen to see if there was active learning happening in this 21st century classroom, since this is something we are encouraged to implement when we begin our learning manager journey. There were learning experiences today that were multi-directional, in which there was evidence of teacher-to-student, student-to-teacher and student-to-student.

Due to the range of students ages and abilities ,there is often times when peer tutoring is encouraged. This allows the teacher to assess if the student offering the tutoring has grasped the concepts, and often students benefit greatly from a students explanation of a concept because it is age appropriate.

There was even an example of 'reciprocal teaching' where a student stood up in front of the class, explained a given concept, and attempted to answer any questions the other children had regarding this. It was unreal to see the level of engagement of the children for this task, they never got 'off task' once in 20 mins, which I thought was impossible! It will be interesting to see when I go back for day 2 of my EPL tomorrow to see, when there is a check of prior knowledge, how much of the information was retained from this reciprocal teaching activity.

If today is anything to go by, I'm sure I will thoroughly enjoy my EPL.

References:

The Abilene Christian University Adams Center for Teaching Excellence, (2000), Active Learning Online. Retrieved April 13, 2010 from http://www.acu.edu/cte/activelearning/focus.htm