6.1 Identify and plan professional learning needs
Demonstrate an understanding of the role of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers in identifying professional learning needs.
6.3 Engage with colleagues and improve practice
Seek and apply constructive feedback from supervisors and teachers to improve teaching practices.
During a recent professional experience placement, I had been working in a prep classroom with a diverse group of students. A number of the students had developmental delays, trauma backgrounds and disabilities, and the class had a high number of behaviour incidents each day. This led to many disruptions during teaching, and I was concerned it was impacting the whole class reaching their learning goals as there was more “behaviour talk” than “teaching and learning talk”.
In order to manage the situation, I identified that I needed to engage in professional learning (APST 6.1) to help manage the challenging behaviours and support productive student participation. To achieve this, I requested feedback from my mentor teacher (APST 6.3) who suggested I engage with the “Essential Skills for Classroom Management” (Education Queensland, 2007). Together we agreed that I would try to implement a new skill each lesson, with my mentor observing and providing constructive feedback at the end of each day. The first skill I worked on was Establishing Expectations, which I did by placing visual prompts on the whiteboard (Artefact 4.1) and explicitly modelling the behaviour I wanted to see. I consistently reminded students of my expectations at the beginning of each lesson and followed up with positive acknowledgement each time I saw the desired behaviour to reinforce it. Using my mentor’s feedback, I also adjusted the structure and pacing of my lessons so that students were not sitting on the carpet for too long and had more opportunities for active engagement (Sullivan et al., 2014).
To continue improving my practice I requested the deputy principal to complete Classroom Profiling on one of my lessons (Artefact 6.1). This involves a trained staff member observing a lesson objectively for 30mins and completing a checklist of the teacher and student behaviours observed. The completed profile gave me an opportunity to identify my strengths as well as reflect on areas that I could improve. As a result of this, I have gained confidence in my abilities and can acknowledge that I use positive feedback in high frequency. I also acknowledge that I could improve in the area of reinforcing expectations, and this is an area I intend to work on as I begin teaching in my own classroom.
