Practicum Reflection Robyn Porterfield In general, I had a really good practicum experience teaching chemistry, though there were

some stumbling blocks along the way. I taught one section of chemistry during my practicum, a grade 11U class. My associate teacher gave me the entire unit of solutions to plan and teach. I was responsible for the daily lessons, the laboratory setup and teardown, the preparation of all demonstrations, and all assessments. One of the areas that I would consider myself to have struggled in is managing labs. Although in our methods class there was emphasis on integrating more inquiry type activities into our teaching practice, I found that during my practicum this wasnt the case at all. All of the labs that I assigned could be considered verification labs and were straight from the textbook. The primary reason that I did this is because the schools department was already set up with the equipment and materials for these labs as they are described in the book. In the future, I would like to take the time to modify the textbook labs in a way to include more inquiry but not extensively modify the materials needed. I also struggled with classroom management during the laboratory periods. It felt like every single student needed my attention at every second and the first two periods of lab work I quickly became overwhelmed. As I progressed through my practicum, however, I started to develop tools to make the labs more manageable, such as giving clear instructions prior to commencing instead of assuming that students had read the procedure. Another area with which I struggled was assessment. I find that I didnt include a variety of assessment techniques, sticking with quizzes, lab reports and a unit test. I also feel that the assessments I did give, in particular my quizzes and unit tests, didnt do a fair job in assessing the students understanding of the material. None of the students did well on any of the tests that I gave them, even those who my associate teacher expected high grades from. I made a decision prior to the test that I my tests would include questions that taxed higher order thinking skills, application in particular. Students were not used to these types of questions and as a result most students didnt succeed (or in some cases, even try) these questions. I dont plan to remove these types of questions from my tests during the spring practicum, though I plan to assign them differently. Instead of giving these questions to my students during a unit test, Ill include them in assignments and informal assessments such as homework. My most successful lesson was the first lesson of the unit. Instead of giving the textbook definitions to my students to find, I constructed a webquest and booked the computer lab. Students were able to find the definition on websites that included a variety of videos, diagrams, simulations and explanations. The website remained active throughout the semester and students were able to continue to access it (I noticed a spike in access the night before the unit test). I got feedback from the students that told me that they really enjoyed this novel way of approaching definitions and that they felt special that I had spent the time to construct a webpage just for them.