Spring 2022 Practicum Reflection

My spring practicum placement was at St. Anne Catholic High School, which also happens to be my former high school, with Mrs. Marianne DiPasquale, the Special Education (Spec. Ed.) department head. This placement was not a normal placement at all as it did not even involve a regular classroom as part of my everyday activities. Mrs. DiPasquale ran the learning support room and special education department, so my role was to help out in the learning support room and help students catch up on work, complete tests, etc. This involved me helping students in not just my teachable subject areas of media arts and business, but also math, science, English, geography, history, etc. I am fairly comfortable with English, history, geography and such, but math and science were slightly worrying to me as I am not very strong in that subject area.

However, as a lot of students were there for math help, I had to do my best to help them out, which required me to look up how to do different kinds of math work to refresh my memory from what I learned in high school. I was able to help in some areas without issue, like percentages and ratios, but things like algebra and graphing required some research or help from Mrs. DiPasquale and/or Mr. Parent, who was another learning support teacher. I was sure to watch them help so that I could learn from it as well, and they even gave me some feedback like how to help as much as you can even when you do not know the subject area very well, as well as learning how much you can help when students are completing tests as to not give them the answers directly, like you can when they are completing regular course work or studying for a test/quiz.

To compensate for the lack of a regular classroom, however, Mrs. DiPasquale arranged to allow me to go observe a credit recovery class for a week so that I can see a regular classroom as well as have some opportunities to teach a few lessons, which the teacher, Mr. Jurkiewicz, was more than happy to let me do, which was very much appreciated. Due to the fact that it was a credit recovery class, a lot of the students were absent most of the time, and they were also not the most engaged students, which required me to pull a lot of the information from them and choose a lot of them to answer questions as very few of them actually wanted to voluntarily raise their hands and answer a question or provide feedback. Mr. Jurkiewicz did a great job of providing feedback after the lessons and offered me suggestions as to how to work with a class like we had where students are not very engaged all the time. I used Mentimeter for all of my lessons, which was successful in my previous practicum, and it appeared to be somewhat successful again, as the students were a little bit more engaged, and I think they liked the fact that they did not have to speak in front of the whole class, and could instead anonymously contribute to the lesson.

Overall, the practicum went very well and I learned a lot from Mrs. DiPasquale, Mr. Parent, and Mr. Jurkiewicz. Mrs. DiPasquale was nice enough to even let me sit in a few transition meetings for students moving to St. Anne from grade school with an IEP, which allowed me to see how that process works and how it takes a team to do such a thing. Although not a regular practicum, I thoroughly enjoyed the placement and the things that I got to learn and the wonderful students I got to help while I was there.