APST 1 covers how a teacher approaches students and their physical, social and intellectual characteristics, their diverse cultural and lingual backgrounds, and understanding how they learn. It is the most regularly demonstrable of the APST in my professional experience to date. One instance that comes readily to mind was with an exceptionally gifted young EAL/D girl during my first placement (1.3). Despite being only in her foundational year, her literacy and numeracy skills were of grade two standard. Both parents spoke fairly limited English which made her language skills all the more impressive (1.1, 1.3). She would regularly have classroom tasks completed early, and her teacher (my mentor) had handily provided her with a personalised “quick-finishers” book. As was to be expected, she was powering through this too. During my conversations with this student, I learned she played with an iPad in her spare time at home. I gathered she was quite adept with technology and enjoyed taking the time to learn and use new technologies (1.2). I negotiated with the school, my mentor and my student’s parents to allow me a chance to collaborate with this student on an advanced-level media project: a video on a topic of her choice (1.5). Little states that extra-curricular challenges can be their own motivators for learning, especially with gifted students (Little, 2012).
I approached the student with my idea and she was thrilled. We began immediately, finding time when she quickly finished her regular work to discuss the process of making a video. This would include planning, storyboarding, filming and effects (1.5). She was key to the creation process, as I wanted to engage her higher-order thinking – and challenge her mentally and creatively (Yen & Halili, 2015). For a topic she selected her fidget spinner – choosing to demonstrate some of her impressive tricks. We watched a number of videos together – and I asked her to point out the various effects and motifs that she found interesting, while I would write them down. We storyboarded the video and shot a large amount of footage which we would later sort through in search of the best pieces. We recorded dialogue and compiled the video according to her preferences.
The media task was received exceptionally well by the student, my mentor, the school and the student’s parents. Implementing ICT into the classroom is a challenge for most schools, but especially foundational classrooms in lower socio-economic areas (Hadjithoma & Karagiorgi, 2009). The student was engaged and challenged for the entire task, which was completed over the course of two weeks (1.1, 1.2, 1.3). In my experience, gifted students are often given a quick-finishers booklet to busy themselves with in lieu of extra work or challenge. While I readily confess it can be impractical to offer an experience such as this media task to every student that finishes early, it inspired me to practice creating challenging and engaging tasks for early finishers in my future classrooms (1.5).
This has become no less relevant as I move into my final semester. The first professional standard has many areas for growth that could inform future initiatives such as the one I just mentioned. I am especially keen to develop my abilities responding to EAL/D students as they develop their early literacy (1.3), and helping ASD students learn and adjust to their limits, triggers and preferences (1.5, 1.6). This will most likely in some part inform my GTPA in my final semester.
