I was really happy with how my practicum went. I responded to and implemented all the feedback given to me by my coaching teacher. My guiding question or goal going into this practicum was to conquer student connections, and after this practicum, I can say confidently that I did so. With this goal in mind, my coaching teacher had given me the advice of doing an attendance question just as he does. When he asked the questions, he would inquire about the students or would ask questions regarding the current unit or novel they were reading. I decided to do something low risk because I wanted every single student to speak during this time. I had one student in particular who had crippling social anxiety, and with this approach to the attendance, I was able to make sure that he spoke every day. By keeping the topics to “what’s your favourite drink?” and “what would you say is a skill that you have, like a skill super power?” I was able to create a safe environment with my questions and show interest in the students’ answers by inquiring further or responding to their answer.

Another way that I fulfilled my previous goal of student connections was to create a larger project that spanned over 14 days of class in which I took them through ideation, planning, creation, and editing of a youtube video. The day before the introductory lesson, I asked after their hobbies in the attendance question. On the day of the introductory lesson, I focused on ideation, and I had the students generate some hobbies that I typed up on the computer’s projector like a whiteboard. Once we had done the ideation together, I asked them to write down those ideas on a piece of paper and then take the paper around the room and write down students’ names that they shared hobbies with. This was key to helping them decide who they wanted to be in groups with. Some of the students discovered people shared hobbies with them that they hardly ever spoke to in class.

In the end, the class was pretty set in their little table clusters, so they ended up breaking into groups that way as well. I scaffolded video planning in my morning lessons that first week. I did a Banecat analysis, where I took a youtube video with over a million views and broke it down into a script for them. We looked at what made a story a story. We looked at formatting on the script I wrote up for the class activity. Another scaffolded lesson on another day was to take an idea of something possessed (such as a possessed pair of shoes) and plan or brainstorm a story around that. This was still part of my ideation phase. Another example of a lesson I did was to use a youtube video explaining how to make youtube videos to analyze how he had done the video, focusing on introductions, content, arrangement of subject matter, and calls to action. The videos that the students came up with by the end of this two and a half week process made me very happy. I used a rubric with built-in self assessment to decide on their final grades for this project, and I used progress reports to work on their writing during the three weeks of this project. Twice I gave formative feedback on slips of paper and asked the students to implement my feedback in their next assignment; therefore, I removed the feedback from the mark itself of the assignment that generated the feedback and used it as a guide for the writing in front of them that day. Students who implemented my feedback saw their hard work recognized in my marking. Students who did not respond to my feedback did not grow their writing and therefore were marked lower for not meeting the expectation of growth I had communicated very clearly to them.

All together, I felt this practicum was a slam dunk. My coaching teacher said I did a great job. I feel comfortable taking on an English classroom now. After going from music to English, I thought it would be a difficult transition, but once the first week was over I felt like I knew what I was doing. By the fourth week, I wasn’t worried at all.