For my first practicum, I had been in an English First Peoples 11 class.

I had been slightly uncomfortable going into an English class as English is not the area I am most comfortable in as I am a Social Studies person. Part of the program is that you have to learn to teach in both areas (English and Social Studies) so I had been happy to go into English first in order to “get it over with”. This is a mindset that I had in my head going into the class and this was not a good thing.

Over the course of my practicum, I had tried a few things to get students engaged and interested and some of them had worked a lot better then others.

One thing that I had tried was asking direct questions when we had been going through the book we used for the novel study. We had been doing Medicine Walk, and I would ask different questions throughout. This had been something that my coaching teacher had wanted me to do, bit I did not find this effective in my classroom. My students hardly ever wanted to talk in class, and this is very common in the older grades (10, 11, 12). Other people in the program had also struggled with this in their classrooms.

One thing that had worked in my class was having a different kind of assignment everyday. For the first 2 days I had done worksheets and question sheets, and that really did not work for my class. They had dbut they hadn’t enjoyed doing it. What I instead started doing is mixing up the assignments and trying to do something different every day. One day we had done blackout poetry, we did mind maps twice (since they had engaged really well with it), letters to the author or a character, and wanted posters. I found that changing around the assignments everyday and trying something new really keep students engaged and usually it kept them working.

My students had also really enjoyed stamps and stickers on their work. They often compared which ones they had gotten with their friends when they got back work. A couple of boys had also expressed that they would have liked scratch and sniff stickers, but unfortunately they had been expensive and wouldn’t get here in time.

One of the things that I really want to work on in my upcoming practicums is upping student engagement and talking up in the classroom.

Something that I have heard from other people is that in grades 8, 9 and 10, students often talk a lot more in class, so I am excited to work with a bit younger students.