Professional Practice
“Teachers are able to make learning engaging and valued. They are able to create and maintain safe, inclusive and challenging learning environments and implement fair and equitable behaviour management plans.” AITSL STANDARDS
My Classroom
 X Chart- My Classroom |  Classroom Management Plan |
|---|---|
 Dance Theory Class |  Stage Directions Activity |
 Timeline Dance-'Cry' by Alvin Ailey |  Timeline 'Cry' |
 Timeline 'Cry' |  Lifespan Development |
 Moral Development |  Lifespan Development |
"Gaynor has demonstarted a high level of competence in structuring learning tasks and managing students. She has shown high levels of creativity in teaching and develops unique ways to engage students in learning." Rachel Woolford Ringwood Secondary College Dance Supervising Teacher
“Teachers have a repertoire of effective teaching strategies and use them to implement well-designed teaching programs and lessons. They regularly evaluate all aspects of their teaching practice to ensure they are meeting the learning needs of their students.” AITSL STANDARDS
As a teacher it is critical I establish effective teaching and learning strategies when designing my lessons. I constantly critique every choice I make as a teacher and the way I choose to engage my students within my classroom. I monitor the students reactions and readiness to learn and the successfulness of the lesson through observation, reflection, peer and self-assessment.
Creating Effective Learning Enviorments
The key to creating a learning environment that is engaging and valued is maintaining learning goals that are achievable for students of all types of varying abilities. This includes correctly scaffolding tasks and offering opportunities to differentiate the curriculum. This could be done by varying the content, process or product.
Click to the right of the slide to see examples of:
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Differentiating the product
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Formative assessment presented in different multi-modailties as examples for students.
In my classroom I also like to promote strong pro-social values such as fairness and acceptance of differences. I place great importance in getting students to work together and create an environment for them to enhance their interpersonal skills.
My focus on strategies to offer opportunities to develop these skills is through co-operative learning tasks. In these tasks I attempt to give students specific roles. These include:
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Reader
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Recorder
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Team leader
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Quiet captain
I have found by giving these roles to students it allows them each to have a specific duty. This especially works with the younger students and is a great strategy for maintaining on-task behaviour. Another co-operative learning task that is especially effective with older students is the Jigsaw Activity.
This activity promotes positive interdependence and individual accountabilty, something I try to really incorperate into my classroom and look forward to having more opportunties to develop these types of tasks with students. By clicking on the button you can download a jigsaw activity on Anger Management, with a flow chart of the movements of students and task cards.
"Gaynor had the opportunity to teach two psychology groups this round. This enabled her to appreciate differences due to group dynamics and other factors. She is showing a much greater understanding of individual differences and is better able to modify tasks/activities to suit these varying needs." Julie Yelland Ringwood Secondary College Psychology Supervising Teacher.
Challenging Behaviour
In order to be proactive against challenging behaviour I keep in mind 10 simple things:
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Give students interesting work to do
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Vary the pace of the classroom activities
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Allow working noise
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Allow questions, mess and mistakes
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Provide a range of activities to suit their learning
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Encouragement and feedback
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Teach them to set goals
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Teach them to be metacognitive
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Develop sound rapport with individual class members
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Set work that is challenging and stimulating.
Through reflection of my teaching experience I have found these key things to be of great support. Throughout my planning I allow time for students to get interested in the content and to developing their learning. It is very important to me, especially in performing arts classes that there is a healthy level of woking noise and students are feeling challenged enough to move through Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development.
Feedback and Assessment
I believe in providing my students many opportunities to obtain feedback and reflect on their own progress. All assessment needs to be fair, valid and reliable.
Formative Assessment Summative Assessment
To be effective, feedback should be of structural nature to allow for a proper exploration by both student and teacher. It should be constructive advice which can lead to improvement due to a problem solving nature.
Assessment FOR, OF and AS learning
In my classroom I like to promote student reflection. I believe in learners becoming autonomous and will strive to bring my students into a metacognitive awareness. This includes students being aware of the best ways they personally learn and being very reflective throughout the learning process. The formative and summative assessments I give students are very important, however for me assessment 'as' learning is just as important.
Student Assessment Data
By using formative and summative assessment, on top of student reflection, I am able to accurately evaluate students’ comprehension of tasks and content. This then allows me to reflect on my own teaching and lesson plans and adapt to the learners' needs.