Getting the most out of my placement

I'm now halfway through my placement in New Liskeard, and wondering what I'll be doing for the next two weeks. The 4 credit focus program I've been working with is putting together a magazine that gets published every year. At this stage, students are setting up and conducting interviews, and getting advertisements for the magazine. This means they are outside of the school working on their own in groups of 2 or 3, and there isn't really any teaching going on.

Working with this group has been challenging. The magazine and the program (called TERRA or Teaching Ecological Responsibility Recreation and Adventure) are all about birds, and bird banding in the area. This is something that is completely new to me, and while I am learning a lot, I don't feel able to contribute much to the class. I have also found the lack of structure in the class difficult. Since it is a 4 credit program, the same students are with us all day, and the whole day sort of melts together, and doesn't seem to have a lot of planning. I am surprised at my frustration with this, since most of the outdoor education settings I have worked in have followed a similarly unstructured approach. Maybe it is because I feel that unstructured time in the outdoors is really valuable, but getting similar value out of less structured time in the classroom requires more careful planning.

On Wednesday, a teacher with an SPH3U class came to my associate and I, and asked if we had some team building exercises we could share with his physics class. There was another volunteer in the TERRA program that day, Luke, and he and I agreed to help out the next day. We went in on Thursday, and played some team building games (also called "initiatives") with the class. It was really interesting, and made me think that it would be nice to take the time to do that in any physics or math class. In fact, we played a name game at the start, and the next day the teacher told me that the students realized they didn't know each others names after almost 3 weeks in a class together (a class of about 17).

I went back into that class on Friday, and observed the physics lesson. They are in a unit on mechanics, and it turns out the teacher is doing some pretty interesting stuff with them. He's really into doing more engaging, concept based teaching. I'm planning on spending the next two weeks in his class, and I'm really excited about sharing some of what we've been learning about this year. I'll write another blog once I've spent a bit more time in his class.

This placement hasn't really been what I've expected, but I guess that's often the way it is with learning. I'm trying to be open to whatever experiences end up coming my way.

Jamie