Secondary Teaching Skills Seminar: Some Suggestions

Abstract

At the University of Victoria, one of our professional year courses is titled, Teaching Skills Seminar: Secondary. It is for students who have taken an arts or science degree first rather than coming through the Bachelor of Education route. They will not have had the thirdand fourth-year education seminars or school experience and will probably not have been in a public school since their own final year there. The skills seminar is an attempt to defuse panic pressures and to instill some reassuring survival techniques. We meet for three hours one evening a week from early September into November, at which time they head out for their first of two six-week practica. Key activities include presenting and discussing potential problems, viewing appropriate video segments, easing into simulations, and microteaching. Obviously, within a three-hour session, considerable variety and change of pace are necessary. All instructors working in the area of student teaching will have their own pet preparations and procedures. Here are some of mine. At our first meeting, after checking the class lists and briefly pointing the way ahead, I use the following technique for early involvement and interaction. I call it Communication Complications (adapted from a technique described in Allen, Ryan, Bush, & Cooper, 1969). Each student is required to describe a diagram that the others must draw but cannot see. The object is to duplicate the original as closely as possible. Students will be told that each diagram involves three 1 x 2 rectangles. Enough separate diagrams have been prepared for everyone in the class to have one, and students pick theirs from a hat, sight unseen. These diagrams are numbered and are of increasing complexity (see examples in Figure 1).