School of Education Professional Practice 3

SELF REFLECTION FORM

Student Teacher Details
Student Teacher Name: Student Teacher ID:
Rees Wilson 18563476
Student Teacher Phone Number: Student Teacher Email Address:
0433030214 18563476@student.westernsydney.edu.au

Placement Details: If you havent complete 60 hours face to face you must provide a detailed statement
of how your experience meets the outcomes for Professional Experience 3. Attach evidence.

Placement Name: Placement Phone Number:

Arthur Phillip High School (RAS) 9635 8638
Placement Address: Placement Email Address:
Macquarie St, Parramatta NSW 2150 Cigdem.suar@det.nsw.edu.au
Contact Person:
Cigdem Suar

Describe in 500 WORDS any features and benefits of the setting you attended. Consider number of students, location
details, age of students, types of educational programs offered and any other salient aspects of the experience.
Consider how this experience will contribute to your development as a beginning teacher.

Standards
The criteria for pre-service teacher reflection focus.
Demonstrating knowledge of teaching strategies (1.3.1)
Organising content (2.2.1)
Setting learning goals (3.1.1)
Seeking and applying constructive feedback (6.3.1)

Subsidiary questions:
What surprised you about your learning in your community setting?
What research about communities did you engage with before you commenced?
What goals did you set for yourself in your service learning activities?
In what ways were you communicating with your community participants?
What do you believe the participants in your service learning project learned?
What did you learn? How will the experience shape you as a teacher in a classroom?

Due Dates are notified in the Learning Guide for each semester. The Self Reflection is to be
uploaded on InPlace along with Timesheet and signed Report.
Submissions after the due date will receive an N grade. At the following HECS census date, if the work is
still incomplete, this will become an AF grade. This is University policy. The AF grade can be changed
when you complete the work. You must also keep a hard or electronic copy of your assignment.

Submit this form online. Your PP3 Report written by the Contract Person, is mailed by them and
uploaded by you on InPlace.
My Reflection

Through my participation in the Refugee Action Support (RAS) Program at Arthur Phillip High School, my
insight into teaching and learning as it relates to students of refugee backgrounds has been greatly
expanded. In my experience, I was surprised that the refugee students seemed no different to non-
refugee students in their desire to learn and their attitudes. Furthermore, as I was also undertaking
Professional Practice Two (PP2) alongside the RAS program, my classroom teaching was impacted greatly
by my experiences here, in knowing what to teach in class and how to teach in one-to-one situations.

In beginning my involvement with RAS, I had expected that I would be interacting with students whose
emotional skills would be greatly impaired by traumatic experiences as refugees, however I was surprised
that this was not the case. In my initial interactions with the students, I would not have known that they
had experienced the trauma associated with being refugees if the program was not focused towards such
students. Further, their language ability was also much better than I had expected. This experience made
me realise the importance of Teaching Standard 1, that teachers truly know their students. Without
developing a relationship with these students, in a classroom, I would not have known of their
backgrounds and the effect this may have on their learning.

Furthermore, I was amazed at the impact that the students background had on their ability to perform
otherwise basic tasks, especially in mathematics. While I knew that refugee students often miss out on
many years of education, it was not until I took part in RAS that I saw the effect this had on their classroom
ability. While I helped students with work from multiple subjects, my focus was mathematics. It was
amazing to see how missing a few foundational years of earlier schooling led to students lacking basic
numeracy skills which they now were expected to know in order to participate in classwork. As such, I had
to organise content (Standard 2.2) in a way that allowed students to gain understanding of basic skills
before focusing on the questions that they had. Furthermore, I was surprised at the difficulty that lack of
language skills had on students abilities to decode the underlying mathematical concepts from questions,
which hampered their ability to answer questions that they would otherwise excel at. As such, this
affected my teaching strategies (Standard 1.3) used in my PP2 mathematics classrooms, where I spent a
large portion of my time deliberately explaining key mathematical words.

Finally, participation in RAS enabled me to develop my abilities in differentiating work and teaching in
smaller, one-to-one settings. In normal classrooms, as there are often groups of up to 30 students, it is
hard to develop skills in teaching smaller groups, however I realised in undertaking RAS that I was already
confident to do this by the time PP2 began. I further developed my ability to know the mathematics
content and how to teach it (Standard 2).

RAS provided me with an amazing opportunity to develop my teaching ability and understanding of issues
which face many students. Through supporting teachers in classrooms, tutoring students, discussions in
group meetings and personal reflection and reading, I believe that RAS has been fundamental in
developing my ability as a future teacher.