End of Placement

End of Placement

7th January, 2016

Nick discusses his placement experience and a different type of special need

Happy New Year to all fellow PSTs and others who are visitors to the blog, I hope your Christmas and New Years break was enjoyable!

It has been a few weeks since my placement block concluded, however, what a wonderful and interesting four weeks it was! This experience for me was one like no other. I was placed in a primary school where a large majority of students were English as Additional Language Learners (EAL). My work as an integration aide and previous placements has provided me some exposure to teaching EAL students, however, this placement involved me learning a lot of new ideas to better inform my overall teaching practice. Many new and interesting challenges arose throughout as it was during report writing time, and there were many extra curricular activities occurring within the school as well.

The most important idea that came out of the four weeks is the significance of modelling correct language, both written and oral. It is something that I have been aware of, but have not consciously implemented into my practice. My associate teacher placed a large emphasis on pausing at words students may find challenging and using their ‘detective skills’ to attempt to work out what the word means in context. Furthermore, I observed the importance of modelling correct language to students. I witnessed many students attempting to implement some new and challenging words into their writing that arose from class based discussion or simply from a word that was read in a book.

One of the absolute highlights for me from this placement was being able to read to the students regularly. This particular group of students were really engaged with teacher read alouds and subconsciously were able to learn a lot from what they were listening to. Asking the question “With a title like this, what do you think is going to happen?” instantly had hands flying up to answer. This inferring practice is an important part of reading comprehension, especially when teaching EAL students as it encourages them to think about what they are reading while reading it. A follow up question I asked throughout the text was; “What do you think will happen next?” Again students were extremely eager to make predictions based on what they had read already. Reading aloud to students is something I value highly as a future educator and will endeavour to do on a daily basis as I think a lot can be learnt from simply listening to a teacher read a text. Students were also able to use their text-to-text, text-to-self and text-to-world connections in order to enhance their ability to predict what they thought was going to happen next in the story.

So how does this fit in with special needs education? As discussed in previous blog posts, the term ‘special need’ is a specific educational requirement that a student may need to benefit their learning outcomes; EAL students fall into this category. To be an inclusive educator lessons must be adapted to incorporate each student within the learning space. A slight adaptation to a lesson such as pausing and discussing new words is an example of being inclusive to this particular special need.

As future educators I believe it is a fundamental requirement to incorporate simple practices like these into the learning space to ensure each student feels as though they are supported and included within ALL lessons and activities.

 - Nick