Critical Learning Experience

In this incident I had the opportunity to work with three students on a reading assignment. The children had a historical journal entry and were asked to identify key words that were already highlighted and place them in the categories of different senses such as smell, taste and sound. For example a sentence would mention that the room was very dark, and the students would identify that the sense that matches with the word dark is sight, as that is something you see with your eyes. Each of the three children I was working with were at different learning levels, two have autism spectrum disorder and are very different in the way they learn and interpret information. The other boy has severe reading and writing difficulties and is behind a grade.

It was an amazing opportunity for critical learning for a variety of reasons. I entered this experience feeling very unprepared to manage these three students on my own. Within this experience I feel I learned many transferable skills that I will be able to take forward with me into future classroom experiences. Some of these skills include problem solving/analytical skills, flexibility and adaptability and leadership qualities. I needed to adapt to my circumstances and shift my teaching style to fit the needs of the entire group and not just one individual student. In doing so, I solved problems within the group and found a method that worked effectively for everyone. Furthermore, I had to facilitate teamwork amongst the students who demonstrated difficulties working with each other, as they were all at different paces. Working with such a diverse group of learners strengthened my transferable skills and shifted my previous ideologies on working with multiple students at once, as I did not feel it would be so difficult to manage (Brail, 2013). Furthermore, this experience made me question the school system and critically analysis the issues within larger classroom sizes. I was able to experience first hand how students can be disadvantaged with a lack of teachers in a classroom with too many students. I could not of imagined how that day would of gone for my teacher without me there to

This experience really made me think about who is in charge of making these decisions that determine how a classroom will function and how large the class sizes will be. It also made me realize how under appreciated teachers often are. As previously mentioned, I could not of imagined my teacher successfully helping all those students, if I had not been there to work one on one with those who needed it, while she helped the others. I experienced first hand what it is like to be helping one student while having a constant flow of other students asking a million questions per minute. It made me appreciate all that teachers do, and I feel this goes unaccounted for in society. I gained a more diverse perspective on the school system through this experience, which contributes to my sense of the community and teaching as a whole (Brail,