6.1 Identify and plan professional learning needs
Demonstrate an understanding 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.
I have worked as a teacher aide for three years primarily supporting children aged seven to nine. Through this experience, I have identified my ability and confidence when managing unproductive or unwanted behaviours as an area of weakness. During my placements, I made concerted efforts to improve this aspect of my practice by experimenting with various behaviour management strategies and actively seeking feedback from my mentor to refine my methods and gain confidence (6.1 and 6.3). During a two-week preservice teacher placement at a primary school in a low socioeconomic area, I worked with a year 5 class of 19 students. This class had high behavioural needs including students diagnosed with ADHD, Autism, and many other backgrounds involving trauma. The school adopted a whole-school approach to behaviour management with weekly social and emotional lessons using the Zones of Regulation framework to encourage students to be responsible for their emotions and actions, and a positive behaviour for learning framework for fostering intrinsic motivation and providing school-wide support for student engagement. Taking guidance from a previously completed professional development course, the Essential Skills for Classroom Management, the classroom incorporated visual aids for expectations, consequences, and regulation strategies. To reinforce clarity, I incorporated my expectations into my lesson slides which gave me confidence to manage various situations. This practice was later introduced when returning to my role as a teacher aide, where my expectations were visually and verbally reminded at the beginning of each session (Artefact 11). This increased my confidence in setting explicit behaviour expectations, giving non-verbal reminders of the expectations by pointing to the visual and following through with consequences promptly, fairly, and calmly.
During my placement, I received verbal and written feedback about my lessons which included specific classroom and behaviour management feedback as this was my identified area of weakness (Artefect 12). The feedback for improvement that I received was to practice and use an attention grabber which I implemented in subsequent lessons using SHELL as it was familiar to students. My mentor teacher also suggested including visual prompts for being in the green zone for optimal learning as some students would respond better to pictures for reminders of the expectations which I implemented in subsequent lessons. This also served as a good reminder for me to use the schools’ metalanguage around emotional self-regulation. Finally, it was suggested to include movement or brain breaks when students became disengaged. This is something that I will endeavour to implement in the future by being flexible during lessons for impromptu movement and brain breaks and cultivating confidence to gain students’ attention and redirect them with clear and explicit instructions.
Overall, my confidence is improving in classroom and behaviour management however this is something that I consistently seek feedback from teachers and practice different approaches to improve my practice.
