It’s almost the end of the semester and my lab experience for this course has almost came to an end. I’ve learned a lot during the course and the lab experience, and here’s what I want to share with the future students who are going to enroll in this class.
The most important thing I have learned during this class is that we as teachers need to respect for individualities in children. Every child is different: they learn in various of ways and their developmental levels varies as well. When planing out small group activities, teachers need to take in consideration of each child’s characteristics, interests, and learning process to plan an activity that engage everyone in the group as well as scaffold them for development. Children behaves differently in the lab, and there might be many reasons behind their behaviors. Pre-assumptions of any child and their behavior is not a good start when working with children. Sometimes children misbehave, and that usually contain deeper meaning than we, as student teachers that only spend four hours in the lab with these children every week, can understand. We need to always see things with open minds and accept the fact that there are many things about children that we do not know.
Class lectures tie with lab experience very closely. The discussion that we have in the class meetings will do tremendous help and provide guidance and strategies for us to use during our lab practices. Team work is another important thing for this course. We constantly work in teams both in lab day teams and small group activity groups. It is important for us to remain awareness of all the children and lab team members doing during lab practice. Sometimes situation occurs when we need help from the other side of the room or in need to take a break, and that’s when good team coordination comes in handy. During small group activity plans, we can talk to each others and make a week-long activities that are consistant on children’s learning experience.
It is highly impossible to avoid working in teams as educators, this course provides us the opportunity to practice what are necessary for our professional practice later on in life. I’ve been taught that college is a practice for professional performance throughout my college experience. For example, attending class shows accountability and team project shows reliability, task management and many other important skills and disciplines. In that case, this course also requires us to practice and refine certain professional performance when working in the lab, such as calling in the lab and finding substitutes when we cannot make it to the lab, as well as dressing up professionally and talking to children and adults with objectivity.
I believe that this is a very nice course for people to experience, whether or not if you want to become educators. It is within my belief that parents need to contain the knowledge that educators do for the children to reach their highest potentials. Parents are children’s first teachers, therefore I think this course will bring people with appropriate techniques and strategies of helping children to development, both academically and intellectually.
Land of Children 