Introduction
After a very busy weekend, celebrating birthdays and a friend getting her first teaching job, alongside finishing off my assignment and prepping for my interview, I am finally getting around to writing this! I was going to put it off until tomorrow or Wednesday, but I figured I may as well do it now or I’ll end up doing one ginormous post!
After a lovely break, it was time to go back to uni and it was lush to see all my PGCE buddies again! I’m not going to go into too much detail of the week – just going to pick out a couple of highlights.
Challenging homophobia in schools
Bullying is a problem that, sadly, effects nearly everybody and, unfortunately, this is often based on discrimination. This week we had Inside Inclusion back to give us a talk about how we can tackle homophobia in schools. The main thing I have taken from this is to challenge anything that may seem discriminatory – if I don’t challenge it how can I be sure anyone else is? And then how will it ever stop?
The Island
On one of our subject days this week, we joined up with the RE PGCE students (all 6 of them!) and had a workshop with a retired RE teacher (can’t remember her name annoyingly!). She got us to do a few different activities, using music and storytelling to engage learners in a different way. However, the one thing she showed us that I feel like I will be definitely using in my future classroom practice is the activity about listening.
She got us all to sit in a semi-circle, with a partner facing so that they couldn’t see her. She then got the person facing away from her to start talking and every now and again she’d hold up a sign with a command such as ‘look bored’ or ‘play with your phone’ on it, to highlight the significance of looking like you’re listening alongside actually listening. It seemed to me that it could be ever so effective in school – we are continuously told to model to students, so why not model to them what listening looks like and help to create to a welcoming classroom for them. Along with this, she said that she always says that the phrase ‘it was only a joke’ or ‘I was just joking’ is banned, explaining how she elicits from the students why that is – and they nearly always figure out that someone else may have been hurt.
Job Interview!!!
I am beyond nervous for tomorrow’s interview. I’m really hoping that in my next blog post I’ll be able to announce that I have got a NQT placement but, realistically, I know I am up against some strong candidates so I am just going to give it my all and hope for the best! (And try not to be too disappointed if I don’t get it… especially as I loved working there on placement!)
J
Currently Reading:
Bleak House – Charles Dickens
The Paper Menagerie and other stories– Ken Liu
Much Ado About Teaching 