Giulia Lato: My Teaching Portfolio
Education in Everything
Second Field Experience
Cycle 3, Level 2
French Immersion
Duration: Three Weeks
Spring 2015
During this second field experience, I had the opportunity to teach a grade level (Grade six) that I hadn't spent much time with in my other teaching and volunteering experiences. I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of it as well as seeing my students achieve their goals at the end of their time in elementary school. In these three weeks, I engaged in many experiences that helped me develop various Professional Competencies:
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Planned lessons with the assistance of my cooperating teacher (PC 3)
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Carried these lessons out in class (PC 4)
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Created and used evaluation tools (tests, quizzes, reflections) (PC 5)
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Implemented differentiation strategies to respond to student needs(PC 7)
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Employed technological resources during lessons in order to maximize learning and engage students (PC 8)
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Participated in extra curricular activities (art club, breakfast program) (PC 9)
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Documented any and all professional learning moments (PC 11)
Shadowing my cooperating teacher really gave me a great idea of what a day in a teacher's life looks like. In other words, I learned a lot about what goes into teaching French Immersion, which is the field I am specializing in. For example, I realized how much focus teaching French requires because it is not the first language of most of the students in the class, which leads to many student errors that I have the responsibility to correct and hopefully prevent for the next time.
One of the areas in which I developed my skills the most during this field experience is classroom management. This was an aspect of teaching that I paid a lot of attention to and that I really focused on when teaching different lessons. My supervisor and cooperating teacher also gave me good suggestions about dealing with student behaviour during class time.
Assessment
Another area in which I developed is that of assessment and evaluation. Right before entering my school as a student teacher, I learned a lot about assessment in one of my classes at McGill, which prepared me because I knew a lot more about the different types of assessment and its purpose in the classroom. My cooperating teacher gave me many chances to create and use assessment tools, such as homework assignments and small quizzes. She also taught me about correcting students' written work and about the correction key that she uses, The image to the left indicates the correction code that she finds most effective to use with her students, which I found to be quite effective as well. Once students are familiar with this way of assessing, they can understand their mistakes and improve.
Reflections and Evaluation
After this field experience, I wrote an action plan that outlined my strenghts, weaknesses, and strategies for improvement. I also detailed how I targeted certain Professional Competencies (1, 2, 4, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12). View my Action Plan here and my Professional Competencies Development here. Finally, I also detailed how I progressed in each of the Competencies in the Yearly Progress Review, which can be viewed here.
As in my first field experience, I was evaluated by a McGill supervisor as well as my cooperating teacher. These evaluations include a Week 1 Report from my cooperatin teacher, 2 seperate lessons for each evaluator (supervisor and cooperating teacher), as well as a summative assessments from each evaluator. View them below.
Cooperating Teacher: