EDN305

Weekly assessment 1
Professional experience: BEd Secondary
By Jacob Wehr-Murphy Student Number: 32664441

1. Consider why reflection is so important. In a few sentences explain why you feel
it is valuable to reflect on both your strengths and your areas to improve.

Reflection is important because it allows us to look back upon our work and ask ourselves
questions about where we can improve how we can improve what we must do to improve.
It also allows us to document our mistakes and successes giving us something to reflect
upon and look back on how far we have come. I also believe the reflection helps with
processing information cementing it into our minds for later.

2. Upload your Final Evaluation Form from previous Professional Experience in your
ePortfolio.

Final evaluation form found below this document.

3. Use your previous professional experience Final Evaluation Form to complete a table,
summarising your strengths and areas to improve. See the template for the table below:

Previous Professional Experience - Evaluation Report

Strengths: Areas to improve:

 Creates safe and supportive learning
environments.
 Organised
 Knows how students learn.
 Provides good critical feedback
 Need to develop my own teaching style.
 Need to understand more about content.
 Objectives need to be more clearly developed.
 Continue to develop signal to begin and behaviour
management plan.
4. List at least 2 more of your strengths and 2 more of your areas to improve, that were
not expressed in your Evaluation Form? This might not be directly relevant to your
teaching skills, but might relate to life in general, eg you struggle to be organised with
what you need to do every day or you are able to bounce back from disappointment.

Areas to improve

 Balancing work and home life

 Focus need to be improved as well.

Strengths

 Very goal orientated.

 Very persistent.

5. a) What is the cause of each of your strengths, including those indicated in your
Evaluation Form and those you have identified yourself?

b) What is the effect?

1st Strength: Persistent

Cause: Was continuously facing difficulty day in and day out with creating lesson plans and
preparing and adjusting plans for teaching classes of different students and abilities.

Effect: Enable me to adapt and adjust easier the more I had to adjust and change my
planning for implementation.

2nd Strength: Goal orientated

Cause: needed to find away to manage my work and effectively plan all my preparation and
planning in an organised manner.

Effect: The result was goals to focus my mind and orientate myself to selectively complete
one task at a time.

3rd Strength: Creates important and supportive learning environments.

Cause: Needed to adjust my lesson plans and adapt them to those students with disabilities
and different levels of learning and understanding.

Effect: researched and found a variety of similar activities to adjust my content and learning
activities for those who couldn’t participate originally or would find it difficult to understand
the content.
4th Strength: Organised

Cause: Needed to find away to organise my entire schedule so that I could foresee what was
coming and plan for it in advance as opposed to being unaware.

Effect: Put calendars and to do lists in places where I could see them which enabled me to
prep for upcoming classes and know exactly what I had to do and how to plan for it
beforehand.

5th Strength: Knows how students learn.

Cause: Took time to listen to the student’s teacher about her previous experiences with her
students and what they responded well to.

Effect: Amended my lesson plans to accommodate all learner’s interims of their types of
learning visual and practical to name a few.

6th Strength: Provides good critical feedback.

Cause: was required to observing and view students work and practical performances.

Effect: implemented what I had learnt previously about the Compliment Sandwich looking
at something positive discussing with the student what they needed to improve on and how
and then reiterating the positive feedback again.

6. a) What was the cause of each of your areas to improve, including those indicated in
your Evaluation Form and those you have identified yourself?

b) What was the effect?

1st To be Improve: Balance between home life and work life

Cause: Unbalanced work and home life.

Effect: All work and no play. Simply put with the extreme amount work I had to do my social
life and personal care for myself was lacking which made me extremely stressed.

2nd To be Improved: My Focus

Cause: I tend to procrastinate quite a fair bit

Effect: Work and assessments take longer to get done.

3rd To be Improved: To develop my own teaching style.

Cause: I was using a mixture of my own skills and the former teachers to maintain the class.

Effect: Made it quite difficult to maintain focus and discipline with in the classes.

4th To be Improved: Need to develop a better understanding of the content I’m teaching.

Cause: Some of the areas in which I taught and the lessons I set out were focusing on areas
that of learning that were quite difficult and required a lot more understanding then I had
to teach them.

Effect: I had to amend my lessons to simpler content until I fully understood what it was I
wanted to teach.

5th To be Improved: Objectives need to be more clearly defined.

Cause: Learning objectives were not clearly stated interims of what I wanted the students to
achieve.

Effect: I had a hard time trying to pin point the area of learning that I wanted my students to
understand which affected the conclusions of my lessons interims of cementing their
learning.

6th To be Improved: Signal to begin and behaviour management plan.

Cause: Students were misbehaving and often not paying attention.

Effect: It was hard to gain focus and to complete work with students.

7. Note briefly the recommendations that were suggested to help you improve weaker
areas?

I was told that if I reflected on the contented that I needed to have a better understanding
of to teach that I would be more confident in the in the classroom when it came to my
teaching of those areas. Also, I was told to improve my signal and behaviour management I
should have a plan already set out from them beginning in order to discipline students who
misbehave. Interims of objectives I will write out exactly what I want the students to
understand interims of the exercises I teach based of the learning and content areas in the
curriculum.
8. a) Refer to the criteria on the Evaluation Form and consider at least 5 criteria where
your skills need development or where you are doing quite well, but can still improve.

1. Understanding of content.

2. Behaviour management.

3. Signal to get students attention.

4. Clearer learning objectives.

5. Develop my own teaching style.

Create an action plan, demonstrating how you can take steps to improve these in a
concrete way. Do this by including at least 3 specific strategies for each criteria that you
will work on.

b) Briefly explain how each of your strategies will help you improve.

1.Understanding of content.

Strategy 1. Reflect on all the areas I suffered last year interims of content. This will allow me
to isolate my areas of struggle in order to effectively begin to understand them better.

Strategy 2. Organise a priority list of weakest understanding to strongest. This will give me
somewhere to start my learning beginning with the stronger sections making sure I fully
understand them and then working my way to the harder content.

Strategy 3. Test myself on each section of content. This will allow me to cement my learning
so that when I’m teaching I won’t always need to refer to previously learnt content.

2.Behaviour management.

Strategy 1. Analyse the classes and their behaviour at the beginning of my prac with day one
being observation. This will save me time as opposed from creating my own management
plan as I can see what skills the teacher uses and then begin to adapt and create a
management plan from there on.

Strategy 2. I will then implement my management plan on day one and review the successes
and failures interims of the management plan in order to continuously and effectively keep
progressing my management plan throughout my prac. This allowing me to adapt to the
classes behaviour rather than having a ridged plan to stick to.

Strategy 3. At the end of week one I will look back on all my successes and failures together
determine what works best and what does not in order to create an effective and efficient
behaviour plan for the following week. This allowing me to be fully prepared for my second
week of teaching and to manage behaviour in a way that does not waste time.
3. Signal to get students attention.

Strategy 1. Learn which way the teacher signals the class to get their attention and use it to
gain their attention as they will have familiarity with it. This way I can gain focus and
attention of the students quickly instead of trying to find my own way.

Strategy 2. Once I have employed the teacher’s methods I will then slowly bring in my own
signal to attention getting them use to it as we go. This allowing me to test a few methods
and see which works best for me.

Strategy 3. Make a list of effective signals and ineffective ones the identify the most efficient
and use that. This will allow me to identify a strong signal to use in class.

4. Clearer Learning Objectives

Strategy 1. Interims of content in the curriculum when I am teaching I will look up the
elaborations as they have outlines of what students should be achieving interims of
learning. This allowing me to gather an understanding when it comes to writing my learning
objectives.

Strategy 2. I will then refer to the content and specifically look at what they are meant to be
learning in order to compare the two and then create a clearer learning objective from that.

Strategy 3. I will then write the objective out with in the plan and then reread the lesson
plan to ensure that my objective is correct. This will allow me to see whether my objective
fits the lesson plan given or whether it needs changing.

5. Develop My own teaching style

Strategy 1. Write out my philosophy on teaching what I want to be as a teacher and how I
want to help the students learn and understand. This will enable me to have a better
understanding of how I want to teach and in turn this wil aid in developing my own teaching
style by focusing in on what type of teacher I want to be.

Strategy 2. Begin to write out a list of success and failures from last year’s prac. What
worked for me as a teacher and what did not so I can begin to compare it with my own
philosophy and from then on understand how to construct and effective teaching style. This
will help with creating strategies with in the class room and eliminating those that simply do
not work. This also allowing me to keep the ones that did in order to improve on them.

Strategy 3. Write out a list of strategies to test on day one of prac. This allowing me to see if
those successful strategies still work and if not why and how I can adapt them to fit the
classes I teach and the style I have. Also reflect on day one to see what worked and what
didn’t this way I can efficiently pin point areas to improve whilst also keeping my own
teaching style.