In recent years, the Grade 9 core courses of the Ontario curriculum have been de-streamed, i.e. students are not separated into academic or applied streams anymore. As a result, a classroom could have students with a very wide range of abilities and interests. To better equip teachers for this new classroom dynamic, OCDSB arranged a set of meetings for teachers to attend throughout the school semester. I was fortunate to attend one of these meetings with my Associate Teacher, Lindsay, on December 20. It was a great opportunity for me to learn from teachers from other schools!
The first section of the meeting was focused on assessment and students' voice. How do teachers improve their teaching to maximize students' learning? All of the teaching practices should be student-focused:
Student voice: Teachers need to first learn about each student as individuals: their personalities, learning styles, interests, etc. Throughout the semester, safe intentional space should be created to allow students to voice their thoughts, which helps foster teacher-student relationships.
Capturing Learning: Teachers should apply various approaches to capture learning in order to meet the needs of students. These are not limited to tests, exams and projects. Teachers can also gather evidence of students' learning through other methods such as everyday observations, asking questions to extend learning, insightful comments, etc.
Collecting Student Data: Assessments (whether they are formal or informal) give teachers data of students' understanding of the concepts taught. We can use this data to know more about the students and identify their strengths and weaknesses. It is also important is that each piece of evidence has a purpose so that we make good use of it.
Learning Challenges: Use data collected to identify any learning challenges that students may face or are currently facing and adjust teaching methods accordingly.
*Students are the ones that inform teachers how to tackle the teaching in each class. We can gather a lot of advice and suggestions from many other teachers and implement them, but only the students can inform us if these implementations work or not.
The second section of the meeting involved splitting into subject groups for discussions. Each group was facilitated by a subject Coach/Lead. I joined the math group, where math teachers from various schools shared their experiences and struggles in their own classrooms. The coach and teachers offered each other some strategies. It was a certainly a great informational session for me, as a Teacher Candidate, to learn from experienced teachers from other schools. All the teachers I met were very friendly and helpful to offer advice to support each other in their classrooms. At the end of the day, an advice I got when I was speaking to the Math Lead was: Observe as many teachers to see how they teach because there is no one right way of teaching. It certainly ties in with the idea at the beginning of the meeting about student voice. No one way of teaching will work for every single student.
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