Student practice: challenges I have faced

 

Student practice: challenges I have faced 

During my time at the British School, I’ve had so many experiences and learnt a lot of things along the way. In this post, I aim to reflect on my time there and share with you the challenges I’ve faced. 

First of all, it was challenging to teach other subjects other than English/French. As I have mentioned on this blog, I have been an ESL language teacher for five years. So, when it came time to support or even teach a different subject, it was overwhelming. At times I was really frustrated, for instance, I didn't remember a particular maths method and strategy. I had the feeling that I failed as a teacher because I wasn’t able to provide effective support thus disappointing my students and the head teacher.  I have never taught maths, and it was a long time since I myself was a student learning this subject. A lot of the time, I had to recall my days as a young student as well as asking for the head teacher for assistance. I tired to solve the problem myself by borrowing the students’ maths book, and I tried to re-learn the methods and complete the exercises. 

Another challenge was dealing with disruptive behaviour. Especially in this classroom, there are a lot of students with learning disabilities and even personal problems at home. Due to this, the students would express their frustrations and emotions with the head teacher. For me this was something new and challenging. Even though, I have a lot of experience working at a public school, I never had to deal with bad behaviour. I think this was because the students were interested to have a different teacher other than their regular one. And many of them were shocked to have a native-English speaker in their classrooms and they were intrigued what I had planned for them. Thus, disruptive and negative behaviour was never a problem for me. I had to heavily observe the teacher’s reactions to these bad or disruptive behaviours and problems that occurred during class. I felt after a period of time, I myself was able to improve my own reactions to students and handle certain situations. 

I can say that the time spent at this school has challenged me in a number of ways and I got to try new methods. One of those methods was differentiated instruction (DI). During my years as a teacher, I always wondered in what ways could it be possible to match a certain task to a variety of students with different abilities. With my mentor back in the day, spoke about this topic, and to my surprise she told me to just focus on the higher achieving students – that we (as educators) can’t be superheroes. I disagreed with her thinking as I question if we all had her mentality, then where is the equality and right for each and every student to receive an acquire education. What happened to no student is left behind? Of course, there are a number of reasons why that teacher thought that way and I don’t blame her – as the public education system in Poland is extremely tough. At this school, I had the opportunity to learn about a new method – observe how teachers incorporated this method in their classrooms and of course, try it for myself. As I just started to learn and understand this concept, I don't feel like I have completely grasped the concepts as I do have a lot more to learn . 

I am very glad that I had these challenges at this school, as it showed me different ways to improve my teaching skills. 

Sara