Week 21: Happy Snow Day

Introduction

I am currently writing this in bed, in the middle of the afternoon on a Friday… thanks to the amber weather warning and waking up to a load of snow outside. (Kinda annoying as I spent ages preparing for today’s lessons, as it didn’t look like it will happen… at least my planning for Monday is done!) Today has been a short week at school, as we had a university recall day on Monday, so I have only had 3 days of teaching – luckily, I had an official lesson observation on Thursday!

This week has also been a week of assessments – so not the most thrilling to teach! In light of this… I don’t have masses to say this week, so will be a short post!

University Recall Day

As always, it was wonderful to be able to spend time catching up with my fellow course mates. Everyone generally has a funny anecdote to share, and there seems to be no one who can empathise more closely with the highs and lows of our PGCE placement.

In the morning, we had a session on how to go about applying for jobs; what to write in letters of application, and how to respond to typical interview questions. I’m not planning on looking to apply until around the Easter break – I want to make sure I put everything into this placement, so I don’t let my standards slip! However, if a job comes up that looks like it would be perfect for me, I am not ruling out applying before then… scary and exciting stuff!

The afternoon session was about how we can integrate the classics into the curriculum. Greek mythology is something I have always been fascinated with…. and something I would love to increase my subject knowledge in! It was really fun and also pretty useful to see how we can teach writing with just pictures. Inspiring.

Bleak House assessments – 9Y

I set the year 9s the assessment ‘compare how Dickens presents characters in Bleak House’ this week, breaking it down to a planning and a writing lesson. One of the students missed the planning lesson, and this was clear in his essay, suggesting to me that the planning lesson was in fact worth doing, and I am thinking about doing something similar for their official assessment.

I marked these essays this morning, and I would like to take a moment here to relish this feeling… the vast majority completely nailed the essay and have proven they understand how (and in a lot of cases why) Dickens presents his characters. It’s such a good feeling being able to see that my teaching has been beneficial to these students!

Unseen poetry assessments

I also had my bottom set year 10s do an unseen poetry assessment. They worked really hard on them and some of them have got higher than their target grades. Unfortunately, a few of them have not managed to get their target grade, so I am going to have to seriously think about how to word my feedback to them.

The main issue with this class is linking their ideas together – they know what language features to look for and they can use terminology accurately, it’s just they don’t always write points that make sense, therefore don’t link the evidence and analysis well. Bearing this in mind, I am going to trial a different approach to another poem on Monday, and hopefully this might help them understand what they need to do.

First Sixth Form Teaching

I honestly felt as nervous as the first time teaching my year 7 class back in October! I kept telling myself that they are just year 11s that are a little older and in non-school uniform… but that doesn’t really help. Mainly because it is the subject knowledge step up that is daunting!

I taught a section of the lesson on accent and dialect, and it went about as well as it could do! I think it is going to take a while to work on how to go about teaching sixth formers, but I know I am going to enjoy it!

Currently Reading:

The Emigree – Carol Rumens

Read in order to teach the year 10s. I’m slowly growing to love the poems in the poetry anthology… wonder if I’ll say the same after a few years teaching them on repeat!

Bleak House – Charles Dickens

A Monster Calls – Patrick Ness

Week 19 – Rock Bottom and Back Up Again!

Introduction

I am currently writing this with overwhelmingly consuming stomach pain… not sure why this is the case, but it was bad last night too! I seriously considered not going into school this morning but, as I didn’t feel too bad this morning, I decided to go in! Annoyingly I’ve felt ok all day… I’ve got a lot to do this weekend, so I better get better!

Anyway, on a lighter note, teaching has been going well this week! I am finally starting to get my head back around planning and teaching and everything in between. The main comments coming out from my observations at the moment is to draw everything together… easier said than done!

Tech fail 2.0

My not so lovely work laptop is the bane of my life at the moment! It has many, many quirks that I am beginning to get my head around, such as changing the display settings every time I plug it in. On the whole, however, I can cope with what it throws with me in a 6-hour school day,

Monday was definitely a case of having to think on my feet – I merely shut my laptop and it decided to completely turn off and not save/ recover any of the files I had open ready for the lesson. Things were the wrong way around on my PowerPoint (and I had been very excited about teaching this lesson – journalist writing about New Zealand!), I couldn’t open SIMS for love nor money (thanks to the teacher I was with for getting it up on her laptop!) and it had decided to make a weird noise when I plugged the sound in to watch a video. The laptop is already very slow, and this completely shook my confidence.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I managed to adapt my way around this, thinking on my feet as it were. It is more that I completely lost face in front of my class! It led to a few dips in the lesson, meaning they just talked over me – more so than they usually would.

It wasn’t the end of the world, but, due to my stressed state, my explanations were anything but clear and I ended up forgetting bits of the lesson I had meticulously planned in.

New Planning Style

In light of how long it had been taking me to write a plan, I decided to use a different pro forma, that I designed myself. So far, it has been quicker àI use a key instead of writing everything out. However, I have been finding myself short of time for planning and, with two assignments on the horizon, I may end up adapting it once more.

Rock Bottom on Tuesday

Following my tech fail on Monday, my confidence was not very high on Tuesday. My 9X lesson went well but my 9Y lesson, on language analysis in the opening of Bleak House, was definitely not. To the extent where I could not say if my students had successfully met the lesson objectives or not. On reflection with my AT, he gave my lesson a 5/10…. Compared to the much higher I had been doing the previous week.

This led me to think about why it had happened. In theory I know what I am doing, I know the aspects to include in a lesson and I know how to present it – I learned all that in P1. So now, I feel, this placement is more about harmonising the different aspects which, I’m hoping, will result in teaching feeling more natural and less of a brain explosion. I felt as if I knew that lesson plan inside out but, when it came to teaching it, I had left out crucial afl pitstops as well as information that would’ve been useful to tell them.

I am lucky to have such a diligent class in most respects, however this was not the case in a lesson like this. The higher attaining students get on with it with no problem, and the lower ability students constantly asked questions and eventually got there. Unfortunately, I had no idea about what was being (or wasn’t being) learned until I flicked through their books at the end. So I am taking this hit as an important one for my journey into a teacher!

Another struggle I face is that the small ways of running things are slightly different to P1… so here is a list for me to look back to if I forget!

Always include a starter and a plenary task – even in the lessons when I feel like they may need a bit more time writing.
Always keep the lesson objective on the board, as well as activity timings and whether they are working in pairs, groups or individually.
Make sure the powerpoint is clear about all (or mostly all) details for that part of the lesson, including differentiation parts.
Remember that different teachers have different ways of teaching their classes and expect feedback that differs widely!!

Pulling myself back up!

That’s enough of the negative points from this week now! There were also a lot of things that went fantastically this week and now, starting as I am writing this, I am going to move on from the bad and focus on the good this week.

I taught my bottom set year 10s this week and completely loved it! They are so lush, yes they chat a bit and do take a lot of nagging to stay on task… but they are so much fun to teach! One of my highlights this week is one of the boys in that group turning the visualiser round to show the whole class his face on the whiteboard. Probably doesn’t sound all that funny but it certainly tickled me! I also did my first bit of marking and ‘reflecting and improvement’ time with them. I feel as if this will be where the challenge lies – they can annotate the poems fine, it’s just knowing how to translate this knowledge into a cohesive paragraph – any tips on teaching this (whilst keeping their engagement!) would be handy!

I also had my first official lesson observation on Thursday, with the 9y class. This lesson will definitely be one of my favourite lessons I have taught so far. Firstly, I got them to go back to the language analysis sheets we did on the Tuesday and use a red pen to improve what we did. I saw improvements first hand – always good to see! This was a very promising start, leading quite nicely into an introduction to satire.

Now, I feel as if satire is one of those things that once you get it you completely get it, but it is pretty challenging to understand. I have also found that the difference between satire and parody is very subtle – and often comes down to the objectivity! This lesson consisted of watching Tom and Jerry, then Itchy and Scratchy – discussing how violence for children is a bad thing. Then looking at Mr Tumble and how we might write a satire of him. All in all – I had fun, they had fun and actually had a lesson essential to their progress!

However, upon discussion that following evening, myself and my AT decide that Mr Tumble/ Justin is hard to satirise – yes he doesn’t care about the children he spends time with when he films something at schools (first-hand information from my cousin, who was working at a SEN school when he came to film there) and yes he is probably just in it for the money. However, is this something that would be worth satirising? We felt that it was in fact more of a parody, which lead to my first sort of ‘off topic’ medium term plan change – looking at the differences between parody and satire.

This then led to another fun lesson today, looking at a parody for an iPhone advert and a SNL satirisation of Trump. After talking through the differences (and a lovely explanation given to the group by one of my HA students!) the class made a unanimous decision that their Mr Tumble satires were in fact parodies. At this point, I said to them that they could create their own satire or parody about anything they wanted. I had some very interesting responses to this, some rather dark! But on the whole, I am looking forward to marking them! (I did have the intentions of doing that this weekend, but I left in a hurry (eager to be home and just have a rest) leading me to conveniently remember half way home – although this isn’t necessarily a bad thing! I also have to write plans/ make PowerPoints for next week, polish off my medium term plans look at some assignment readings amongst a sackful of other things… so I’m taking this as a good thing on this occasion (even if I do end up having a lot of work on Monday!).

Teaching Targets

Due to my increasing work load, I will be now cutting this part of my blog – I go through it with my AT in our weekly meetings, so I still have a record of it!

Currently Reading:

To also cut down on my time spent writing blogs, I will only write a mini-review when I have finished a book/ play/ poetry.

Poetry – Focused on Exposure again this week, as I was teaching it.

The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde

Bleak House – Charles Dickens

Girlhood– Cat Clarke

Week 18 – Back at it again!

Introduction

So, I am sat writing this a day early, as I have a rather busy weekend ahead of me, and I already can’t quite believe what I have achieved in 3 days of teaching and observing (excluding the inset day on Monday!). I am over the moon to be back at school; by the end of the week, I will have taught 4 starters, half a lesson and 3 full lessons. I am extremely proud of how hard I have been working this week, and I am certain I will keep this up for the rest of the term (hopefully!!).

Alongside the highs, I have also seen a glimpse into the lows – they have already started and will inevitably only get worse as my work load increases. My university tutor has suggested I make sure I take one night off during the week (probably a Tuesday or a Wednesday as that’s when the stress seemed to be hitting me) and actually get out of the house! Now, I haven’t done that this week, but I aim to start it next week and I will hopefully see some improvement in my wellbeing! I am also already ridiculously tired… so if anyone reading this has any suggestions other than sleeping more (I always average 7-9 hours a night) or drinking coffee (can’t abide it!) they will be more than welcome!

Inset day

It was really interesting to see what happens on an inset day, after making the most of so many of them as a student with lie ins and socialising with friends/family! The day was split into three: Housekeeping, feedback and gifted and talented students; Faculty based work (I also had a chat with my AT about my teaching this week); recent safeguarding issues and recapping ready to learn.

I am not going to into too much detail about this, as a lot of it is directly related to the school’s recent Ofsted inspection (happened the day after the inspection for my P1 school!). However, it was interesting to see the sort of training that goes on for teaching and support staff; it was also really good to get a chance to get to know the faculty a bit better before the students came in!

EPS assignment

Following the inset day, I felt as if it would be more appropriate to go for my second idea of looking at gifted and talented students in sixth form, with an emphasis on how feedback can aid pupil progress. I feel that this will be particularly interesting, as I looked at a few different ways of giving feedback in p1 – this should definitely both help me give feedback that genuinely aids pupil progress, as well as reduce marking time for me! I submitted my proposal mid-week, so I will hold off on doing anything further now until my idea has been ok’d!

Sixth Form

It was amazing to finally get a chance to officially observe sixth form classes – I thoroughly enjoyed helping out in 12 literature and 12 media last year when I did a bit of work experience! In particular, I really enjoyed going into the English Language class – looking at Robin Lakoff really brought back memories of why I am so passionate about my subject! I intend to purely observe the lessons for the first few weeks before beginning to teach. Teaching sixth formers is slightly different to teaching ks3/4, therefore I want to ensure that I am able to adapt my teaching style to suit each class.

9Y3 – Nineteenth century prose

I believe I have manged to grasp at my students’ interest, thanks to an interesting start to the Dickens half of 19^thcentury prose, and on the way, I have been reminded about how much I love fiction from the Victorian era! My AT started off Tuesday’s lesson with a game https://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/multimedia/dickens/(need to make sure flash player is allowed, or disable then allow flash player for it to work). There is the opportunity to get 2000 points and the students had the challenge to get as high as they could get in the time limit. The winner got just over 1,200 points!

I then introduced the research task, which was finished off for homework and helped them to create posters on Dicken’s life, works and times. We had a competition to see who had the best poster – all the students seemed to have a lot of fun doing this and, as I opened the second lesson by asking them to tell me a fact they had learned when I called their name on the register, they all seem to have good contextual knowledge in time to start on Bleak Housenext week!

9X5 – Travel writing

This topic gives me great pleasure as it combines two of my all-time favourite things: English and travel! The introductory lesson was about the differences between a tourist, traveller or explorer. I introduced the definitions of the three, before doing a quiz with the students to find out if they were more of a tourist or a traveller. This was also a lot of fun; the students all appeared to be engaged and were loving finding out what everyone was!

The next lesson I taught was on the ‘ingredients’ of travel writing, which involved analysis of the first extract they will see. This was the first full lesson I was to take, and I was pretty nervous about doing so! However, on the whole it went really well – the students are completely amazing, I am very lucky to have two eager year 9 groups!

Tomorrow I will be taking them again, looking at the positive and negative connotations of different words, particularly adjectives.

10X5 – Power and Conflict poetry

It has been decided that I will be teaching the year 10s for the first-time next Wednesday, looking at ‘Exposure’. In the meantime, I have been doing ‘Haribo’ starters with them – a quiz looking at different aspects they have covered so far, tallied up each lesson and at the end of the half term, a winner will receive a packet of Haribo. They seemed to really enjoy this concept – although not many of them got the questions right. Teaching bottom set will definitely be a challenge for me – I am so used to having to stretch and challenge students predicted grades 7+ that I am going to have to do a lot of work to in order to teach them well – one of the reasons I decided to do my curriculum practice assignment with them!

The lessons the teacher is doing with them have a rigid structure that is applied to each poem, with the theory behind it being that they will then be able to apply this to any poem that they come across. Each student has chosen their own colour for each of the three assessment objectives, has split up the page in the anthology so that each AO is together, and annotated the poem, heavily scaffolded by the teacher. This has meant that each poem has only taken one or two lessons to teach, and they all seem to be getting a basic understanding of the poems. My challenge is to keep them engaged to continue this for the rest of the term!

I have also chosen to let them know I am a trainee teacher – only time will tell if that was a stupid mistake or not! I want my students to know that I respect them, so if they ask me why I am here and what I am doing, I intend to be as honest as I can and hope that they have the integrity to respect me back! So far so good, I have already got a couple saying they are excited for me to take the lessons – this may because the only teaching I’ve done with them so far has involved the prospect of sweets, but I’m taking it as a win!

Teaching Targets

I have decided to start my targets a fresh and will only do one main target a week until I get back into the flow of teaching (hopefully by this time next week but you never know!)

Lesson timings: pacing is one of the aspects of teaching I regularly seem to not quite get right. One of the teachers I am working with suggested that I put the time expected for the activity on the PowerPoint so that the students are completely clear, thus, in theory, helping me to not go off on a tangent!

Currently Reading:

Poetry – Tissue by Imtiaz Dharker

I had a look at this poem earlier on in the academic year, when myself and a colleague prepared a lesson plan for it – little did I know that it is many teacher’s least favourite poem! I love this poem. The extended metaphor is beautiful, and I love how it questions the fragility of humanity in such an elegant manner.

Drama – The Importance of Being Earnest byOscar Wilde

Ok, so I only read one-page last night before falling asleep…. Update next week!!

Novel –Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Definitely questioning whether I will finish this book before I get around to teaching it the second time! Just got to the part where Esther meets Lady Dedlock for the first time. I have read a summary for this novel, as I will be teaching extracts from it next week, therefore it has been very interesting to me to read it in light of what I know about their relationship to each other!

YA Fiction – Girlhood by Cat Clarke

I intend to start this novel tonight, so will update next week!

References (if necessary)