My Biography of teaching will be an account of significant events in my life that have influenced me to become a teacher. I will discuss my personal journey, professional practice and professional engagement and identify the strengths and weaknesses of my developing teacher practice.
Professional Knowledge
My drive towards becoming a Health and Physical Education (HPE) Teacher was created in high school, through the influence of a number of HPE teachers. Through courses that I have completed at university, I am now able to comprehend that I am a kinaesthetic learner, and so I found it difficult to understand new concepts if they were being taught through written tasks. I know in school that there were many visual and auditory learners around me as they demonstrated the ability to understand concepts by repeatedly studying them and completing worksheets. I found that for me to learn, I had to participate in discussions with my teachers and ask them to demonstrate new skills so that I could visualise myself doing it. My HPE teachers must have seen that this was my individual learning style, and so they began to include more ‘hands on’ activities in their teaching practice. Along with this modification, they began dedicating their lunch times to extra tutor lessons working towards Year 12 exams and practical assessments. If I had not received the help I did, and the opportunity to learn from my HPE teachers, I would not have been able to fully understand and become intrigued in the study of the body. My HPE teachers encouraged me to take on a Certificate III in Fitness while completing Year 12 which provided an in-depth knowledge of exercise science, sparking my interest in being able to teach students about what I enjoy so much.
Moving forward a couple of years in my teaching journey to university placements, I began to see the ways in which my teaching could positively impact on student participation and motivation towards learning. Athletics carnivals were always the highlight of a professional placement as you are able to become more than a student’s teacher, but also their coach. Through participating in as many professional development courses over my degree as possible, I have become more confident in teaching students the skills required to compete in events to the best of their abilities. During the athletics carnival of the most recent school I worked at, there were a number of instances where students had searched throughout the venue for me to seek last minute training tips and technique assessments. In other examples, a number of students were simply seeking forms of encouragement to help with their nerves and to re-establish the confidence they needed to compete. As a HPE teacher, these heart-warming experiences identify you as a role model, and you begin to see how your voice can affect each student individually. A teacher’s actions may be the difference between a student exploring their options and participating in something outside of their comfort zone, and a student who refrains from challenges to succeed.
I want to be a teacher that has a positive influence on student’s lives and their attitudes towards participating in HPE. In my future endeavours, I will aim to be a teacher, coach and role model to my students. I hope that through the establishment of close, professional relationships, they will view me as someone they can trust and rely on to help them succeed.
Professional Practice
What does it mean to be an effective teacher? In my personal opinion, I would justify teaching effectively as ‘making a difference on a student.’ Reflecting on the numerous professional experience’s that I have had, I have learnt that students learn through creative lessons that set challenges. By participating in activities like these, students become engaged quickly, develop a desire to learn and begin forming a strong, professional relationship with their teacher. For myself, I know that I have achieved effective teaching when I am able to see a student who previously was not interested in Health or Physical Education, begin to develop an interest in the topic and transform to engaging with the topic at a higher level.
Before my most recent professional placement, I relied solely on Marzano’s Effective Instructional Strategies. I had found that these strategies were effective mainly for in class, theoretical work and focused specifically on “reinforcing effort and providing recognition,” “cooperative learning,” and “setting objectives and providing feedback.” (Pickering, Pollock & Marzano, 2001). These three instructional strategies were also able to be crossed over to practical learning, and students began to see a pattern in the use of these which was beneficial for familiarising them with my teaching style. Specific to a practical context, by understanding and utilising Marzano’s strategy “setting objectives and providing feedback,” I was able to improve student performance of skills with effective feedback on their abilities and which learning goal they can create for the next lesson (Marzano, 2007).
Throughout my most recent professional experience, the theories informing my understanding of becoming an effective teacher have developed from using Marzano’s strategies alone, to utilising Archer and Hughes Explicit Instruction and the National Institutes Direct Instruction (Redmond, 2017). Through my education program, I have been taught the difference between these theories and others, along with the instructional strategies within them and which strategy suits each context of teaching. By incorporating Direct Instruction into my teaching practice, I have witnessed the advantages of outlining learning intentions and success criteria into each lesson, asking frequent questions to check for understanding, and giving students obtuse opportunities to practice the content they have learnt (Hollingsworth & Ybarra, 2009).
Professional Engagement
Reflecting on my most recent professional experience, I am able to see a wide scale of improvement in my teaching practice. In my first week of teaching, my feedback forms demonstrated that I was working between a scale of partially developed to developed, taking all seven standards into consideration. Throughout the experience, I noticed an improvement in my performance as I had learnt from the feedback and began investigating ways to correct areas marked as partially developed. By attending professional development sessions, positive behaviour meetings and researching the instructional strategies used by the school, in the final week of my placement I was working within the exceeding expectations level of each standard.
An area of strength that I bring to the teaching profession is the ability to be able to work effectively with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and understand the ways in which they learn best. As an adolescent, I had the opportunity of growing up in a remote, Indigenous community which meant that my closest friends were either Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. When I began completing coaching, sports trainer and personal trainer courses in Year 12, the youth of local Indigenous communities were those I worked closely with in their training sessions and AFL games. By growing up working closely with Indigenous children, I have been presented with an advantage as this allows me to work comfortably within Standard 1 “know students and how they learn” (AITSL, 2010).
The school that I completed my most recent practicum at was in a remote community, located in Cape York. The percentage of Indigenous students at the school was 60%, and this meant that teaching styles such as Habits of Mind and Productive Pedagogies (Redmond, 2017) were not effective in delivering the content so that students could learn it. Indigenous students learn best through explicit instructions and outlined behaviour expectations so they understand what is required of them and what they need to do to achieve this (Archer & Hughes, 2011). After the first week of teaching at the school, I reassessed my teaching style and began to create explicit lessons. Each lesson identified my three behaviour expectations “respect yourself, respect others, respect your school,” and included two learning intentions along with a lesson success criteria. Students began to familiarise themselves with my teaching style and knew that when I wrote up their learning intentions and success criteria on the board, they were to copy it into their books and this explicitly explained what they would be doing that lesson. As I began to develop a rapport with the students, the reinforcement of my behaviour expectations decreased as levels of disruptive and challenging behaviour decreased concurrently.
Throughout my teaching time in Cape York, I had set myself a goal to improve my ability to manage challenging behaviour and distinguish between non-appropriate and appropriate student language. As outlined in standard 4 “create and maintain supportive and safe learning environments,” teachers are required to ensure that all students are behaving appropriately so that they are not disrupting the learning of others or causing themselves or others harm (AITSL, 2010; Maclean & Wilson, 2009). I have identified this as two of my weaknesses because I found it difficult to manage the situations, mainly because most of them seemed to be minor behaviours that needn’t be addressed. One of the main issues that teachers are faced with in schools, but more commonly in remote schools is the use of inappropriate language and reference to drugs. To effectively work within standard 4.4, teachers should be aiming to implement strategies that support the safety of all students and are concurrent within system, curriculum and legislative requirements (AITSL, 2010; Maclean & Wilson, 2009).
Through observed classroom behaviour, reflection and frequent feedback, I was able to identify the above areas that required improvement. Throughout the professional experience, I set myself the challenge of working on these weaknesses and identified a number of ways which I could do so. Each school implements a system they are comfortable working with that allows teachers to report on student behaviour and remain up to date with student actions (Knoff, 2009). The school I was working within utilised a program called Oneschool, in which I sought out a professional development session in. In doing so, I was able to learn how to document inappropriate references made by students which in turn protected myself. At the completion of my placement I had learnt that through personal reflection, discussions with other teachers and the use of Oneschool, I was able to manage any inappropriate connotations towards drugs or sexual activities. In my future endeavours as a teacher, I will aim to familiarise myself with school systems earlier and will be able to identify myself becoming a stronger educational professional by completing continuous reflection that shows whether or not I am working within each standard.
By securing the opportunity to complete my practicum in a remote Indigenous community, I was able to apply strategies, that were previously learnt, for teaching and managing challenging behaviours of Indigenous students. My professional experience on Cape York was challenging and it encouraged me to explore creative lessons that promoted my own self-awareness. As stated in the beginning of this blog, I have identified myself as a kinaesthetic learner, which means that I learn best through practical activities, and this is a learning style that I recognised in many of the students at this school. Through the collaboration of growing up in a remote community, teaching in suburban, rural and remote schools, and applying my knowledge learnt in university, I have developed the ability to read the world from multiple viewpoints.
References
AITSL (2010). Australian professional standards for teachers. Retrieved June 15th, 2017, from: https://www.aitsl.edu.au/australian-professional-standards-for-teachers
Archer, A., & Hughes, C. (2010). Explicit instruction: effective and efficient teaching. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.
Hollingsworth, J., & Ybarra, S. (2009). Explicit direct instruction: the power of the well-crafted, well taught lesson. London, UK: SAGE Publications.
Knoff, H. (2009). Implementing effective school-wide student discipline and behaviour management systems. Little Rock, AR: Project Archive Press.
Maclean, R., & Wilson, D. (2009). International handbook on education for the changing world of work. New York, NY: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Marzano, R. (2007). The Art and science of teaching: a comprehensive framework for effective instruction. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
Pickering, D., Pollock, J., & Marzano, R. (2001). Classroom instruction that works: research-based strategies for increasing student achievement. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
Redmond, P. (2017). EDS4401 Beginning Professional Practice: Course notes. Springfield: University of Southern Queensland.
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