My Educational Experiences And Personal Identity

University has given me the exceptional opportunity to reflect upon my previous educational experiences. I have decided to focus on my time assisting in a geography class during my last year of school, that has had a significant impact on how I will approach behaviour and focusing on the needs of the individual child as a future educator. Furthermore, I have focused on my negative experience of a curricular area, mathematics, and how it has highlighted the importance to me of striving to make sure pupils have a positive experience of the curriculum as it will increase their potential to achieve. I will explore how academic texts have allowed me to further understand my experiences and have shaped my professional and personal identity as a result.

I tried to make the subject relevant to him, by talking about it and providing visualising ways of remembering curricular content, such as diagrams and colour, as he struggled with memorizing words due to his dyslexia. Bruner believed that the use of language played a crucial role in children, in particular those who had dyslexia or dyspraxia, as it allowed them to develop their thinking and understanding of the content by speaking aloud about it (Gray and Macblain, 2012). It became evident to me over the course of the year that this method was successful, as the boy had the potential to achieve great things, which was displayed when he got full marks on a test. This experience will have a significant impact on myself as a future educator as I have learnt that it is important to avoid labelling children based on early behaviours. It is also obvious that the need strive to apply respect and patience within the classroom is essential, and that I need to meet the individual needs of the child, such as adapting ways of learning to suit their nature and

When I attended primary school, I was confident in the area of mathematics, perhaps due to the active and discovery learning approach. Discovery learning, a concept created by Bruner, is a teaching approach that encourages children to be actively involved and engaged in their learning, and uses the child’s past experiences to create new knowledge and skills to develop their thinking. Teaching methods include using visual aids and learning through play and working in groups (Gray and MacBlain, 2012). The use of real life situations and resources such as water and sand at primary school helped to visualise mathematical problems, which I found easier to understand and process. However, when I went to secondary school, I struggled with mathematics and always got low grades. I believe this is due to the change of methods of teaching, as there were no examples to help me visualise the curricular content, which led to a questioning of the relevance of the subject and associating it with negative connotations. Furthermore, there were behavioural disruptions within the class, which the teacher focused on more rather than adapting learning for the individual child. This negative experience of a curricular subject has urged me as a future educator to strive to ensure all children I teach understand what they are