Artifact #3

Educators Engage in Career-Long Learning

B.C. Standard #7

During my year in the Teacher Education Program I had the opportunity to attend Professional Development seminars and listen to a number of different speakers inside and out of my class time. These events are listed under Personal Development here on my blog.

I also had the opportunity to learn about, and have a small taste of, action research. There were a couple students in my practicum class that had extreme behavioral issues that would sometimes interrupt the class and disturb the students. I had heard that students are more likely to remember how they felt more than they remember actual events. I wanted to look into this to find out if my grade 1s were going to remember their year filled with fear, r if the behavior plans in effect had left the students feeling safe and secure.

It was a whole different feeling entering the classroom as a researcher. First, I had to make sure the students knew what my purpose there was. I was not there to answer their questions or to help them, I was merely "a fly on the wall" and I watched as much as I could. I took field notes and observed the interactions between students. After having that opportunity I felt like every teacher should get the chance to see their classroom that way. When you have the chance to sit back on the sidelines and just watch, you catch things that you may have missed when you turned your back as a teacher. It really helped me get a deeper understanding for my students and see how they had developed during my time with them.

Over the course of the three hours that I spent at the school that day, I had the opportunity to talk to 10 of my 22 students and do a small interview with them. When I wrote the questions for the interview I had an idea of what I thought there answers would be. Some of my thoughts were correct, but the answers they gave to the open ended questions at the end surprised me. I am not sure if it was the way I worded the questions to them or that they just think about likes and dislikes in a much more concrete way than I had thought they would.

Having the opportunity to do this activity opened me up to a whole other aspect of teaching. I was previously aware that as a teacher I would be a life long learner but I never thought of myself as a researcher too. This is something that I hope to be able to do more of in the near future and would like too incorporated into all teachers practice. We could get a lot from each other if we all had the opportunity to do research and share it, even if it was done between a couple teachers or one