When you teach at 0.8FTE, you could end up having around 16 contact hours in a week. Sounds great, right? Consider the planning that goes on outside of that. Sure, maybe in the afternoons or mornings, but also on the weekends. And holidays. If you’ve been doing it for a few years, you’ll have enough tricks…and previously dedicated time to have crafted your skill and developed content that matches your context. Context being your location, your educating cohort, for that year, and that content.
As you can see, there are so many variables that can change, especially at a moment’s notice given how fluid and volatile social dynamics between young people can be. Where there is consistency though, at least between many years, is the curriculum. Within the Tasmanian public schooling system, there is no dedicated (and prescribed) curriculum that teachers must follow, like it is in Queensland. We are given the Curriculum and told to “teach”.
Personally, I enjoy this challenge. I enjoy that you can open a “document”, be presented with something so broad, and create an engagement for young people that will, hopefully, connect them to ideas, concepts, and skills that will provide a scaffold for their participation in society after these formative years. Thankfully, the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) provides some examples on the website and links teacher to other potential examples (hello, scootle) that will alleviate some of that forced creativity.
There are, however, some classes that seemed to click when I was teaching. I was worried about being a Home Room teacher at first, thinking, “how the hell am I going to fill 1 hour and 40 minutes with a class of 20 students?” But, you figure it out. You figure them out and they figure you out. If you are reflective and flexible, you get into that groove together. For this post, I thought I would share some of the wins that I had teaching.
Grade 7/8 English
Personally, I love the start of this lesson. Questioning is such a great way to pull someone into a good and inquisitive vibe of a room. My idea was to connect the students to the activity by connecting themselves through past experiences. The ‘I am’ poem was composed by John Clare, in 1844 or 1845, and was written with an iambic pentameter, and an “ababab” rhyme scheme in the first stanza, an “cdcdee” scheme for the second stanza, and an “fgfghh” for the third stanza. The poem details his finding of a sanctuary from the travails of his life in the asylum by reasserting his individuality in life and love of the beauty of the natural world in which he will find peace in death.
When I implemented it, I didn’t have the rhyme scheme in mind. Instead, I wanted the young people in the class to connect themselves to this poem. Below are various links, but feel free to peruse them, take them, adapt them, anything you want to do with them.
Here is a link to all of the (editable) files as a folder:
- Activity sheet
- Lesson plan
- Examples
- Mr. Miller’s example
- Template
Grade 7/8 ICT
I also took Grade 7/8 ICT. This was fun after I had, the year before, also taken a Computer Club for 8 Fridays in the last block of school. My idea with this was to have students engage with various forms of ICT to assist in developing their digital literacy, along with English and Mathematics. My main skills to address this were: planning, organisation, time management, budgeting, and Excel (of course, I mean, have you seen the majority of this blog?).
I have concatenated a few lessons together and left some notes at the end, if you’re interested in developing on them:
Grade 9/10 Music
During my time at the school, I noticed that the students’ theory wasn’t the strongest. This isn’t a bad thing, but given what the curriculum asks for and with the experience that I had (teaching myself theory at and after university), I thought it was a great idea to introduce the students to a new topic every week. In term 1, I had prefaced the entire year with the awareness of music, i.e. notes, chords, keys, and how they all work together to play and write songs. The assessment they had due at the end of that term was a Hot Cross Buns transcription (timely as it was Easter).
Term 2 was about ‘Listening to Music for Detail’ and learning how to use musical terminology to explain what they’re hearing. Here are some of my favourite excerpts from those lessons. There’s also an activity sheet with the list of songs that we listened to and analysed (with in-class discussion) each week. It was definitely an activity that students got into and loved chatting about.
James Miller CV 