Week 25 – Back to School!

Introduction

Placement 3 begins! It’s quite refreshing having a new ‘placement’ but still being at the previous school – I’ve become quite comfortable here and I’m relishing having (on the whole) a fab rapport with both staff and students! I’ve had a few hiccups this week but, on the whole, I am definitely seeing a great improvement in my teaching… about time!!! Teaching the same topics again, as well as creating a detailed medium-term plan, has really shown me that it is worth putting in extra effort at least a week before teaching – I have felt much more comfortable with what I am teaching, which I feel has really come through in my lessons. 

First Lesson Back Fail!

Period 1. Monday. First day back after a week off. Poetry Assessments. 

Not a group of things that are particularly nice to combine! I have definitely learned a lesson this week!

Basically, myself and the class teacher decided to postpone the assessment until after half term, as it was more pressing to get all the poems taught, so they had notes in their anthologies. I thought that it had to replicate their GCSE exams, so I hadn’t planned in any extra support at all, just a quick starter to go over the poems, a bit of group work to get some ideas flowing about what poems could link to Kamikaze, before getting them to start their assessment.

Yeah, this totally failed. I decided to stop half way through the lesson and give them a plan (turns out they were allowed as much support as they needed for this assessment!). Now, I redid this lesson on the Tuesday and they were much happier and confident – neatly reflecting in their results! I am very proud to see that the vast majority of them had met or surpassed their target grade! 

Subject Knowledge Success!

This is my awkward week where, with my 9x group, their class teacher teaches them on Wednesday period 5 and I teach them Thursday period 1. I had planned most lessons in advance this week and asked the class teacher to go over gothic in Bleak House chapter 16. By the time I had finished my EPS session, I had an email from her saying that they didn’t really get it, and they would need to go over it in the following lesson – commence frantic planning session!

When I first started teaching Bleak House with my other year 9s, I honestly felt a little stupid at times, because I didn’t fully understand things and I definitely needed to work on my subject knowledge! However, this time round, I had surpassed my own expectations in Bleak House subject knowledge, and I was able to engage all 26 students just by talking to them about gothic in chapter 16. It was one of those moments where I wanted to thrust my fist in the air and shout with joy! They got it!!!

The moments in teaching when the class seem to hang on to your every word have to be my favourite – and then when they actually reproduce work that shows they do understand it makes all the time spent planning and reading worth it.

Sixth Form 

As I am only here for another 4 weeks, I decided to pick up an extra year 12 language lesson, as I have a lot of frees on Wednesday week B.  We are finishing off the topical language issues, preparing them to write a final blog about taboo language. I’ve only been team teaching these lessons so far (I will be taking full lessons in the next couple of weeks), but I have been loving them! English language is fascinating and taboo language is an interesting topic that engages all the learners – they all seemed to have a strong opinion on it!

This week is also the week I see the year 12 literature students, who are just a delightful bunch of hard-working students – I am super lucky with the class I have been given! I team taught ‘Lime Tree Bower my Prison’ on Thursday – one of my favourite Coleridge poems so far (I just love that he wrote a poem whinging about not being able to go on a walk, because his wife spilled boiling milk over his leg!). 

In their following lesson, (well it was actually only a couple of hours ago as I write this!), I took the plunge and took the whole lesson and got an official observation in as well. I got the students to become the teachers – working in groups to look at the themes in different sections of the poem and then getting them to annotate on the board and talk it through. This worked really well – I wasn’t sure if some of them would be completely unwilling to do this (I know speaking in front of their peers can be quite daunting at times) but they were all comfortable to do this – and they did it well!

The one thing I need to make sure I do, which is quite overwhelming for me, is to make sure that I know what the highest-grade students should be pulling out from the poems and making sure they do this! This will come into my planning – I am teaching Rime of the Ancient Mariner next week, so will have to have a look at all sorts of criticisms, mark schemes and example answers to see what I need to include. =

HA Sessions

I actually love taking these sessions! It is so refreshing to be looking at the same content as my bottom set year 10, but from the perspective of the highest ability year 11 students who are due to take their exams in a matter of months. The difference is incredible – I am still not sure which one I prefer though!

This week we looked at context points simply about George Orwell and how these relate to Animal Farm. This is mainly so they can write a more sophisticated answer by including context about why Orwell was doing what he was doing and not simply relating it to the Russian Revolution. I had found a few things over half-term that I thought were quite interesting, and the two girls seemed to really engage with the material which was very exciting for me! 

J

Currently Reading:

Frost at Midnight & This Lime Tree Bower My Prison – Coleridge (recap for lessons)

Animal Farm – George Orwell

Bleak House – Charles Dickens

Split Second – Sophie McKenzie