Introduction
We did it! We have made it through the hardest part of the PGCE year and survived. More importantly, I have finished P3 feeling like I still 100% want to be an English teacher and I am 100% sure that I will make a good English teacher… someday! It is now the beginning of our study week, latched on to the Easter holidays. 3 whole weeks off, dedicated to the big assignment, organisation and actually having some time off.
So, considering this, I am going to make this a fairly meaty post, both reflecting on the past week, but also thinking about my time with each of my classes as a whole – the goods, the bads and the steps I can take to continue to improve my practice.
UT visit
Tuesday was a frantically busy day – in a good way! As mentioned previously, my lovely UT came in to observe me in my year 12 language lesson. I was unreasonably nervous, mainly because I took them for the first time just last week. In my head, I didn’t know the class very well and there were a few students that I was concerned about – their engagement levels fluctuate dramatically and, in my last lesson, one student just walked out of my lesson saying she was going to the toilet… turns out she had an anxiety attack and couldn’t face coming back in.
I spoke with their normal teacher, and decided to split them up into pairs, making sure they wouldn’t be with someone they normally work with. This was going to go one of two ways – it would be the worst idea I have ever had or the best. I don’t know whether it was the groupings themselves, or if it was the fact that an unknown adult was sitting in the back of their classroom, but thankfully it worked amazingly! The student I mentioned previously was paired with one of the highest attaining students and they worked fantastically together, despite complaining about it to begin with!
Needless to say, the lesson went a million times better than I ever could’ve imagined it going… thankfully! Obviously, the lesson wasn’t perfect (I can always think of a plethora of things I could’ve done differently after the lesson). But the range of activities (this class love a language bingo!) and attitude to learning worked fantastically – plus I rather liked the dinosaur theme!
I had my feedback afterwards, as usual, which ate into my only free of the day. With a full day, plus tutor clearing duty and an after-school session (which 1 student turned up to!) ahead, I didn’t really have the chance to stop and think about the work load. I guess that is what it will feel like when my timetable ups when I (hopefully) get an NQT placement next September!
Saying goodbye (for now!)
It’s so weird how I felt a little emotional saying goodbye to my classes, even though I will be seeing them again in a month and a half. At the moment, I will only be dropping one class (signs are pointing towards 9X5) and keeping the rest – I will go into more detail about that further down! So, I have been keeping my goodbyes vague, saying I am not sure what will be happening when I come back.
Some of my 9X5 students brought in a few treats to share in my last lesson with them (resulting in a lack of concentration for the last 20 minutes…. At least they had finished their DIRT by then!) and they gave me a round of applause at the end of the lesson… was super sweet but felt a bit overwhelming, especially as this class is the class that I am likely to drop!
My other classes left showering me with praise, a mixture of disappointment as I won’t be there, but excitement at the potential of me coming back. Going back to the start of the post, this is what has made me 100% sure that I will be a good teacher someday. The students could just leave the classroom, not saying anything at all, or just saying a polite goodbye and good luck. Yet so many students took a few seconds of their precious time to give me personal thank yous, telling me I had boosted their confidence, helped them to understand something they never thought they would, that my lessons were fun (less of a compliment but I’m glad they’ve enjoyed my lessons!) and so on. Yes, some of them might’ve been postponing going to their next lesson, and yes there were quite a few students that didn’t even acknowledge me on the way out of their classroom. But to know I have made such a difference in some of these young people’s lives over 11 short weeks has given me more confidence than any pupil progress data ever could.
And here I have left the best until last. The teacher who normally takes 10X5 is the one who nearly had me crying today, and I am sure she will have me crying on my last day of p4! (Those who know me well know that this actually isn’t much of a deal… I’m rubbish at goodbyes!!). She started my day with a card and a present (a set of beautiful stationary – what a dream!) telling me how grateful she was for the work I have done with her class. But it didn’t stop there. She organised for one of our students, who I also see at tutor time (and she also only learned my name last week!) to organise getting each student to sign my card – I’ll pop the picture underneath (obviously names are blanked out!). The best part about this, was that I thought she was trying to give me her exit ticket for the lesson and I was busy encouraging them to write as much as they knew about Animal Farm before the end of the lesson. I asked her to sit down twice and it wasn’t until the teacher said to me “just take it!” that I realised it wasn’t her exit ticket. It completely took me off guard and was just the most beautiful moment! At first, I wondered how they managed to get this done in my lesson without me knowing… until the student proudly told me that they did most of it in science! (she must’ve been planning this for a while, because a couple of my students had been off for the past couple days.
So, even though it was hard saying goodbye today, I am excited to spend the next few weeks working hard on my assignment (and having a well-earned break!) before going back to university for a few weeks, then back to my lovely placement school. I imagine it will fly by quickly – as the rest of the year has done so far!
Reflections
9X5
19thCentury prose has been a challenge for this group. They are a bunch of talented creative writers but grasping how to write a literature essay has been harder for this group on the whole. This week they did their end of unit assessment; I planned it with them, and their other teacher took the lesson where they wrote it up. Focusing on feedback from the students the last time they wrote a short essay, I decided to adapt my planning sheets and have them to just do a quote explosion instead of putting it into a structure. I massively overestimated what they would be ready to do, forgetting that these are year 9 students and are getting used to simply writing an essay – the last one they did was way before Christmas! I forgot my number one rule – scaffold down in mixed ability lessons.
This led to 11/26 students not meeting their target grade, and I am completely and utterly disappointed by this. I feel like I have failed nearly half the class by not differentiating properly. This is something that I had worked so hard to get right and it has just spiralled downwards. However, this is my PGCE year and it is natural for mistakes to be made… many mistakes to be made! The most annoying part is that I know that these students could’ve done better than this, and that it was my planning sheet that had let them down. So, next time, I am going to focus on making my planning sheets differentiated – making sure my lower and middle attaining students have the support they need in order to achieve. Adding in the PEAL structure so they are crystal clear about what needs to be in each paragraph and sentence starters for those I know struggle with phrasing.
I have also learned a big lesson with regards to medium term planning – don’t plan for DIRT work on my last day! They were far too excitable for any useful improvement work. The whole class model of a paragraph went well (although a few students were still adamant they wouldn’t be able to do it!) but, when they went to reflecting on their own work, I completely lost them, however this could also be to do with the sugar rush from the treats they had brought in!
9Y3
I have relished the experience of teaching travel writing in two completely different ways, especially as the research, drafting and redrafting lessons in the computer rooms meant that the projects were mostly student led. In these lessons, I had time to go around and speak to each student individually at least once, gauging where to best put my support, and the support of other adults in the room. I am extremely proud to say that, with most students, good progress was made. On average, each student made progress of nearly 2 marks each. This may not sound like much but, as the grade boundaries are so narrow, it shows that all my hard work was not futile! Only one student went down in marks (one of my high attainers; she completely changed her travel writing, adding in a storyline about a father who died with cancer – whilst it was still a grade 9 level, these tweaks meant that her register wasn’t assuredly matched to her purpose any more).
I also believe that, for the students who neglected to listen to my advice (I regularly prompted them to improve what they had done already as opposed to adding in extra ideas and paragraphs) they have learned a valuable lesson. These were the students disappointed by their mark – don’t get me wrong they still did well (only 4/25 were below their target grade whereas 14 were above!) – but I think they imagined they would be getting a grade or two above their target grades. This led to a very interesting discussion about how best to use their time – particularly when it comes around to writing a timed creative writing piece.
Obviously, this was a successful scheme of work, with the majority of the students making great progress. However, if I were to teach this unit again, I think I would do a mixture of the two units. The planning and drafting stages, whilst useful, took up 3 out of the 5 weeks, weeks where I missed out some of my favourite lessons, I did with 9X5. I like the idea of giving the students a choice on what to write about (within reason!) but I also liked the more structured creative writing, using video clips and images as inspiration. One thing I will definitely be using again are my pink for perfect starters and the peer assessment sheets, the students loved celebrating their own work and it was lovely for them to have a range of different people giving them feedback, as opposed to just the person sitting next to them!
10X5
We did it! We finished Animal Farm with 15 minutes to go before I left P3! I am honestly so proud of this group. They have worked super hard and are regularly demonstrating to me that they understand this novel – they can link it to context and most of them are able to tell me quotation too! Surprisingly, the idea of linking actions to themes (taken from the Science of Learning framework) has worked incredibly well! They still remember all of the actions for the themes nearly 5 weeks later – hopefully meaning that they will be able to remember them for their PPEs and (eventually!) their GCSEs. They are a very biddable group, when it comes to trialling new ideas, and are quick to tell me if something doesn’t work or if they don’t understand something!
I’m not going to dwell on these lessons any more … mainly because I’ve just looked at my word count and I’m already over 2,000 words (oops!) but also because I will be focusing on these lessons over the next week or so as part of my curriculum practise assignment. This class have given me valuable experience in behaviour management. The school I am at are at a kinda of turning point with their RtL system – it is not as strict and rigorous as my first placement school and teachers are urged to build these great relationships, only calling for ‘on call’ if they are extremely needed. I have only needed to send one student out once, but I sent him to their normal class teacher in the office as opposed to calling on call. Now, I realise that I wouldn’t be able to do that if I had a class on my own, and I am aware of the procedure I should follow. However, I am also painfully aware that I do not have a job for next year yet, and I don’t know what behaviour system they have in place. I have only worked in RtL schools thus far, so I have been experimenting a little with different ways of managing behaviour.
I feel as if the most effective way is building up those good relationships and making praise the focus in my lessons. Although low level disruptions are very much in every lesson with these students, they are all getting the work done and I regularly assess their learning and see progress being made. Yes, I may turn a blind eye if my students are quite obviously not reading along with the text (some of them pretending to have a nap!) but actually, when they are doing that, they are not disturbing any of the other students and I know they are listening – out of all the lessons I have had with them, I can only think of 2 occasions where one student in particular (the napper!) could not answer a question about the plot of Animal Farm.
For a bottom set, I’m calling that a win!
12 Language
I will be definitely working with this class again and, now my confidence has soared with this class, I’m looking forward to seeing what new challenges await with this class. I am going to focus on two things with this class when I’m back with them: firstly, not being afraid to differentiate my questioning right down to closed questions when I am met with the a-level wall of silence, and ensuring that my students are stretched and challenged as far as they can be – there are a lot of predicted A and A* students in this group!
12 Literature
I feel like this is the class that I have made the most progress with since January. I was petrified to take this class. Similarly, to 12 language, there are a lot of predicted A and A* students, in a very small class. The students come up with some fantastic ideas, but the level of subject knowledge needed was one that I doubted I would get to. Now, coming from a stretch and challenge perspective, I feel as if I had begun to address that in the lessons this week. However, I think the best way for me to know what it is they need is to work closer with the class teacher (easier said than done – she is the head of department!) in what elements high level students need to know, and consult with the OCR mark scheme and frameworks to make sure I am clear on what they need to cover.
I am also excited about an idea I had as a project for these students. After watching a couple of (completely terrible) video adaptations and summaries of the poems, I had a chat with the teacher about maybe getting the students to create their own videos, to be used as a teaching tool in the future. Knowing the students in this class, and some of them in the other literature class (a fair few take English literature and language!), I can imagine some fantastic videos will be produced… if one student’s ‘topical memes’ about Coleridge and Wilde are anything to go by!
Plans for P4
As mentioned previously, it is likely that the only class I will drop is 9X5, leaving me to have a less packed timetable and an opportunity to do things I have not had the opportunity to do before. A couple of these things include:
- Teaching at a local middle school
- Visiting the school’s trust first schools
- Spending time in the student welfare and inclusion centre
- Observing lessons in other subjects
- Creating a lunchtime club
I will be going back in the midst of PPEs, which will be really useful, with regards to getting some experience around mock exams. Hopefully, I will be able to use my existing knowledge of my classes to ensure I really help them achieve their full potential in these exams!
J
Currently Reading:
Pains of Sleep & Kubla Khan – Coleridge
Our House – Louise Candlish
Bleak House – Charles Dickens
Dreaming the Bear – Mimi Thebo
Animal Farm – George Orwell
Much Ado About Teaching 