First year as a BT! \ (•◡•) /

A belated post...

Its the end of the year... After not posting for the last 3 terms, I thought it would be nice to reflect on my journey. While I have not committed to posting, I did continue to find ways of improving myself and helping others. In this post, I want to share about my biggest takeaways and take a snapshot of what are the problem faced by myself as a new beginning teacher. I will also hopefully document some of my systems and plans for next year so that I can better hold myself accountable for the next year.

Here are some of my biggest advice I wished someone told me while starting my practicum 😊

1) Learning curve is steep but rest will come eventually

I was initially quite overwhelmed by the steep learning curve. Drafting lesson plans is definitely not easy, especially when you have to account for references and implementing pedagogy. As a beginning teacher, you will take 4 to 5 classes, and sometimes they can be all of different levels, subjects and syllabus codes. This is particularly daunting, especially when you cannot reuse your resources.

What I have learnt is really to push through it, and at the end, it will all be worth it. Holidays feel great. To me, it felt that for my profile of students, as long as they study, they could succeed, and my job is to take care of myself to make lessons as fruitful and engaging for them as possible.

2) Experienced teachers and books are my mentors. Friends are my support.

I am blessed to be assigned nurturing mentors, supervisors and Cooperating Teachers (CT) during my untrained teaching and practicum days.

While chatting with some of my friends, not everyone is blessed to have such a nurturing environment. That's when I realise books have taught me a lot, especially when I don't know what I don't know. Hence, I decided to start a book review series in this blog, partly to serve as book recommendations for beginning teachers (BT), partly to help remind myself what my key takeaways are from the book. I have a few book reviews coming up, so stay tuned!

I have to thank my friends who have been my pillars of support. I am so lucky to have friend groups in NIE and in my practicum school and I still keep in contact with my friend from UT. Its always nice to have people in same stage of life as you to just talk to and relate over. Eventually, I also learnt to find joy in chatting with people I can learn from as well as finding ways to help others with knowledge I have.

3) Unit planning is important

While this was touched on briefly in NIE, it was mostly skimmed over and I have not been really told my any mentors to do it. If I were to become a Cooperating Teacher (CT), this is actually one of the most helpful things I feel I could get my mentee to do. Especially for someone who studied the syllabus in silos, doing unit planning helps me to make sense of the whole syllabus, how they are interconnected, and what it means to me and to the students to teach the content of the syllabus. While we say that students should be equipped with knowledge based on the learning outcomes (LO), any experienced teacher will know that not LOs are created equal and no two teachers will have exactly the same interpretation of the all the LOs in the syllabus. Teachers are here to draw links and create meaning between content and real-world. Thus, how a teacher interprets each unit and topic in the syllabus is more important than just delivering content. Any student who rote memorises the textbook and practices hard using the LOs can answer the LOs. But we cannot say the student has learnt.

Summarising

My first year has definitely not been an easy one... So, if you are struggling out there, you're not alone. Trust that things will get better, yes.. they will. Sometimes, its not about planning the perfect lesson. Its about bringing your best and truest self to the students. Remember, to take care of yourself and to love your students!

Before we begin a new year, and my second attempt to make this blog happen, here are my plans in writing so I can hold myself accountable. You should try it too!

Plans for this blog for the next year

• Book reviews (1 per month)

• Journal with Me (1 per week) - where I just reflect on how my week has been. I am really just aiming for consistency here...

• Transforming some of my blog post into a podcast (ad-hoc, maybe 1 per term) always thought it would be mean a lot to me if someone listens to my content while they are exercising or commuting just like what I do