Fall 2021 Practicum Reflection

My Fall practicum placement for November to December 2021 was at Kennedy Collegiate Institute with Mr. Bryan Yaworsky, a business and learning support teacher. This placement was a not like most placements since Mr. Yaworsky was also a learning support teacher, which I was curious as to what I would be doing as part of it, but it was a fantastic learning experience. The class that Mr. Yaworsky taught, and that I was a student teacher in, was BTT1O – Grade 9 Business Technology (Open). I was quite excited for this course as my two teachables are Communications Technology (Media Arts) and Business, which this class sort of combined together, which allowed me to gain some teaching experience in both teachables in the same practicum placement.

Before my placement started, Mr. Yaworsky went over what his plan was for me and what I would be doing in the classrooms and what I would be teaching as well. Because he is was a learning support teacher as well, combined with the quadmester layout of the time, he only had one class during period one, every other week. The weeks in between were learning support all day, which meant that my five-week practicum was really two and a half weeks in an actual classroom. To compensate for this, Mr. Yaworsky had me start my teaching the first week that I was there, and I actually taught every other day after that until my placement was done.

At first I could tell that the class wasn’t quite sure what they thought of me and wasn’t very comfortable with the fact that I was teaching them, but as I kept teaching the class and choosing students to answer questions during the lessons and made the lessons as engaging as possible, I could tell that the class was becoming much more comfortable with me as they were talking to me more and more, as well as volunteering to answer questions. When I started my first few lessons, Mr. Yaworsky provided me with previously used PowerPoints which I changed a few slides in to make the content newer, but after a few lessons I decided to make all of my lessons using Mentimeter since it made the lessons more engaging, and I wanted to see what the students thought of it. As it turned out, the students loved it. In fact at the end of my practicum, I taught a lesson using a regular PowerPoint again and the students were very disappointed with the fact that it wasn’t a Mentimeter presentation. That fact has influenced me to use interactive presentations as much as possible for all of my lessons, as it seems that students stay more engaged with the lessons and have more fun while learning various topics.

Overall, the practicum was very successful, and I learned a lot. Being in the classroom was very beneficial in learning about classroom management, teaching lessons, keeping students engaged and on-topic, an much more. Being in learning support with Mr. Yaworsky was also an eye-opening experience. I got to see and learn more about an aspect of education that I never really thought about, which was helping students recover their credits and what work goes on behind the scenes to help students get their diplomas and get the help they need to graduate from high school. Mr. Yaworsky was a fantastic associate teacher who taught me a lot and helped me understand what the job can be like and what else teachers do other than just teaching in a classroom.