Week 4: Games Week

This week was really chill since students are winding down before their summer holidays and most time is spent playing math games as well as other strategy games in math class.  Wednesday and Thursday, I spent with another teacher since my CT was away with his mentor class on a 3-day class trip. Ms Joedicker, as the students address her, teaches mostly Year 4s and 5s from what I've seen and her class size is significantly smaller than my CT's, Mr Garratt's. Hence, the class was a lot quieter and easier to manage. It doesn't hurt that the students enjoy the classes now since they get to play games.

Thursday evening, we gave a presentation about Singapore at the farewell dinner at Stockholm University. We also met other international students and heard a presentation on their school life here in Stockholm. Friday was the reflection seminar at Stockholm and went into more detail on what we learnt as well as any differences we found between our education systems that we were curious about. We got to talk with other student-teachers and hear about their home country's education system. They were from Germany, Spain, and Finland if I remembered correctly. It was fun to compare aspects of our education and learn from each system to see why they are designed the way they are.

Looking back on the entire 4 weeks, I am a little disappointed that we came at the period right before their summer holidays since we didn't get to see that much teaching done. I did not get as many opportunities to teach as I would have liked but I suppose it could not be helped. With the time spent here, we got to learn about the education system as well - grading, banding (or lack thereof), student profiles, behaviour management, and others. There were quite a few differences in our systems but I think these differences are required to suit our contexts. Like how Singapore splits students by their grades into classes but Sweden ensures there is equal distribution of high ability and low ability students in each class. It is weird to us but it makes sense to them due to the social norms and expectations here. I also learnt a few things I hope can be helpful to my teaching in the future.

Oh and some pics of the school interior that I always see when heading to my CT's class. The only difference is that the hallways are usually filled with students.




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