MTeach Portfolio — Michael Chipman
This annotation addresses APST Standard 1, descriptors 1.2 (Understand how students learn), 1.3 (Students with diverse linguistic, cultural, religious and socioeconomic backgrounds), 1.5 (Differentiate teaching to meet the specific learning needs of students across the full range of abilities) and 1.6 (Strategies to support full participation of students with disability).
Students learn in myriad ways — by building on their pre-existing knowledge, by seeing the connections between different elements of their learning, through making mistakes and by hard work, and through the self-questioning that arises with unexpected results. In the first lesson with my Year 9 science class from my initial prac, successful learning resulted via some engaging demonstrations, through class discussions and think-pair-share activities, and through notes projected to the interactive whiteboard (1.2). One effective strategy used in science teaching is the predict-observe-explain (POE) instructional method, where students are prompted to predict an outcome only to be surprised by the actual result — which serves to reinforce the understanding that then follows. In this first lesson for the Stage 5 topic Heat, light and sound (PE1 - lesson slides - 170821 - 9S4), POEs were used at the start and end of the lesson to good effect, as noted by my supervising teacher (PE1 - observation - 170821 - 9S4).
In mathematics, any opportunity to work in a different or hands-on fashion is generally well-received by students. The first Year 9 mathematics lesson in my second prac, like the science class mentioned above, used a couple of demonstrations to better engage students and improve their learning (1.2). In this lesson on the surface area of cylinders, familiar objects were used both as models and as prompts for questioning students, as described in the lesson plan and corresponding supervising teacher observations.
The cultural diversity of students on my second prac was relatively high, with almost 60% of students having a language background other than English. Some senior students were international fee paying students, as was the case for my first prac school. The extra assistance I gave these students (1.3) was noted in my supervising teacher's comments on my first prac, this additional help being seen as effective differentiation (PE1 - observation - 170823 - 11PH2). Further evidence of my ability to differentiate my teaching in accordance with student needs (1.5) is shown in the report from my second prac, where I was said to "understand ... students' varied approaches to learning and [use] strategies to incorporate differentiation". In this context, mention was made of my "good use of [a] variety of activities, such as PowerPoints, quizzes, talking, board work, and Geogebra" (PE2 - report, p. 2).
One demonstration of my knowledge and understanding of legislative requirements and strategies to support participation and learning of students with disability (1.6) came in an assignment I submitted for the MTeach subject Inclusive Education. In this assignment, attached, a lesson plan for a Year 10 class from my first prac was adapted to cater for three students with disability: