ELS student shares his experiences about his internship at high school 'Het Streek' in Ede

During my ‘Mastery Biology’ study at Wageningen University, I wanted to perform my four-month long internship at a high school to practice my educational skills. I searched for an assignment where I could show my academic skills that I learned during my biology study, as well as my teaching skills in the classroom.

At high school ‘Het Streek’ in Ede, I was offered such an opportunity. There I was able to create my own lesson series for VWO5, based on the biology of the eye, ear and vestibular system. The lesson series consisted of practical seven lessons, which I would teach as well after creating them. I started the first six weeks with creating all the lesson materials, like a study guide and answer book for the students, and a teacher’s guide for the teachers. I decided to start the first lessons of the lesson series with some practicals for the students to perform, to test the functioning of the eye, ear and vestibular organ. The students then continued working on a group assignment, where they would make a poster, therein showing exactly how the eye, ear, or vestibular organ functioned, and explained for several diseases how these diseases would impact normal functioning of this sensory organ. The weeks after I had completed developing the lessons series, I taught these lessons to three VWO5 classes.

For me, creating the lessons series was fun for the first 3 weeks, where I could search literature to gather ideas and start creating the assignments for the students. In the following 3 weeks however, developing the lessons became a bit dull, since I was sitting behind my laptop all the time and was mostly busy working on all the details of the lessons. I mostly enjoyed teaching the lesson series to the high school students, because that was something I had not done often in the past. Besides, it was exciting to see whether my lesson series would be enjoyed by the students. Luckily, most students were quite enthusiastic, which made it fun for me to teach as well. I have learned a lot from performing these lessons, as well as from the feedback from my supervisors; like how to best structure a lesson(series), how to handle different types of students, how to create order in the classroom, and more. This internship made me really excited to continue a career path in education, which is why I will be studying to become a first-degree biology teacher next year!  Luckily, my supervisors from ‘Het Streek’ were satisfied with the results as well, as they will be using this lessons series for the years to come.