Journal Writing Experience

The day that I chose to write about occurred while I was at work, on this particular day I was working in the technology department (as I have mentioned before I share my time between the art and technology departments). Throughout the course of this day I thought I would be a good day to reflect on for my journal as I refer to this day as my first bad day at this school. I was an extremely busy day so I did not have the opportunity to put these reflections into words until the following day; something that I was later to learn would be very beneficial to me. I am going to try as much as possible to not give you any of the particulars as events that occurred that day involved existing students, in spite of this you will be able to understand what I have learnt from this exercise.

        I found this exercise very useful as it allowed me to break the day down and really analyse what was successful and what wasn’t. As I have mentioned before I am still relatively new to teaching and am still learning a lot, especially control and discipline. This is one of the biggest challenges I have encountered in this job. Mainly I think it is because I was not prepared for this level of insolence and disobedience as my only prior school experience was my own which was very different. I was lucky enough to attend a private school in Derbyshire where we had a healthy fear of our teachers. Also the fact that I am young and look a lot younger then I am, and I am short so by year nine most of them are taller than me; because of these factors I think that some of the students  don’t respect me as they do some of the larger male teachers. At this point I would just like to clarify that these students that I speak of are a small minority, the majority of them are very pleasant.

The first thing that I noticed about this exercise was how long it take to put in to words a series of events which only lasted a few minutes; but it allowed me to carefully think about what had happened and try to relive some of the moments. When writing about my initial reflections they were very slightly different from what I was think at the time, this is one of the cases where I was unable to write down my reflections at the time and had to wait until the following day. As mentioned above I think this was beneficial as at the time I was very angry and emotional and I don’t think I would have been able to reflect on the event objectively. It also allowed me to realise how worked up I was by the events.  I believe if I had written about it straight away I would have focused more on the particulars of the event, the behaviour of the students and my emotions towards it and less self critical. This exercise made me realise that one of the main things I need to work on is not to let what students say or do to me wind me up as this is the only reason they are doing it.

In this case I found that making a list of things that came to mind and things that happened was the least useful part of this exercise. I found that other methods of writing helped me to reflect on my day more effectively. In particular writing about the day from another person or an object’s perspective, in this case I chose one of the student’s who had been involved in the day’s events.  Again I thought it was more beneficial that I didn’t write this perspective straight away, I allowed myself to mull it over in my mind for a day or so, so that I could look at the situation objectively from the students point of view. I still drew the same conclusion, the child was showing off and being unnecessarily rude but it did help me to think about why some students feel it is necessary to get attention this way and it made me think about possible ways to try and diffuse the situation if a similar one arises again.

Another reason I chose this day to do this reflective writing experiment on was because in our school we have a behavioural monitoring system called ‘Iris’ which we use to record student’s behaviour both good and bad because this is something that parents can review if we enter something negative about a pupil we have to justify it by giving a brief description of the event. Whilst doing this I realised that I was majorly paraphrasing the events ad thought it might be useful for me to write it out in full if only to give myself a full description of what happened.  When writing from the perspective of the child I thought that this might be a good exercise to get them to do following an incident such as this. It would allow them to portray their side of the story privately without their peers influencing them and it would allow members of staff to see it from the child’s point of view thus giving us an insight into their behaviour and the reasons why they do some of the things that they do.  This is a suggestion I am going to make in our next departmental meeting.

In conclusion I have found this exercise extremely useful and insightful as it has helped me to highlight where I am going wrong. I managed to identify the specific aspects of the day that got me upset and annoyed and by identifying them hopefully if a similar event occurs in the future I will be able to handle the situation much more effectively.