Week 22 – The Epiphany

Introduction

This week, I had an epiphany. This epiphany was that I can teach. I am a teacher.

No matter what happens next, with review point 2 and my PT observing me next week, I can sleep soundly knowing that when my students come into the lesson, they will leave it having learned something (the vast majority of the time!).

This epiphany has been a milestone in my PGCE career. I am no longer stressing about every little target and are looking at them as the stepping stones to make me the best teacher I can possibly be.

I want to be the best teacher I can possibly be.

So, with that in mind, I am as determined as ever to continue what I am doing, but to also let myself appreciate other things that are important in life. It was one of my friend’s birthdays this week, so I have allowed myself to have two evenings off (crazy I know) and dedicate my time to her. Yes, the work load is never ending. Yes, sometimes I feel like I’m drowning in things I need to get done. Yes, the stress that I am not working when I feel like I should be working 24/7 is never going to go away. BUT, I have been working on focusing on what I need to do to keep myself sane. Regardless of these epiphanies, I’ve been feeling more down than up this week and I can’t seem to pinpoint why. This next step in building my career is to make sure that it is manageable for me, and I don’t isolate myself in an infinite prison of work. I can be a good teacher and maintain good mental health – it’s just going to take a bit of time to work out how to harmonise the details.

Bottom set year 10, period 5, teaching tissue – so why the LOG?

Picture this….

‘Tissue’ by Imtiaz Dharker. Stunning, thought-provoking and inspirational, yet completely, utterly and astoundingly difficult to grasp. I have spoken to some teachers who still say they have no idea what Dharker was trying to achieve with this poem. Every English teacher I have spoken to has said this is, generally, the hardest poem to teach; the hardest poem for students to get their head around.

Tuesday, period 5. The end of the day, just had a break for lunch, concentration levels are low. The week is still new, there is more left of the week than done.

Year 10. Bottom set. Concentration levels aren’t best on the whole, throw something challenging in the mix and they don’t always appreciate it.

So why, why WHY did I decide to make this an officially observed lesson by my AT? He doesn’t know the class, but is obviously familiar with the lesson context, mentioned previously. (This was definitely a blessing in hindsight.) I was stressed beyond imagination about this lesson. One of my lovely colleagues said to me something along the lines of if you nail it, you’re a fantastic teacher. If you mess it up, you’re just like the rest of us – this made it feel more manageable but didn’t stop my nerves. Did I mention that I had already started Tissue the day before, it didn’t go overly that well and this is why it was moved to this lesson?

However, despite the over the top anxiety, the lesson couldn’t have gone better! (Actually, it definitely could have for reasons I will explain in due course… but in comparison to my expectations, it was the best it could’ve been!) The students were actually able to prove they understood (on a basic level) the poem and seemed to make progress in how they structure and write their ‘PEAL’ paragraphs (I mean we’ll see if they remember everything for the end of unit assessment, which will most likely be after half term!)

I also managed to tick off one of my targets – adapting the lesson as I go to meet the needs of pupils. I had a little… moment of human error. I may have been too prepared for the lesson, printing off the resources before checking them properly. I had typed up the paragraph we wrote together the lesson before, with the intention to have them underline where we would have met the assessment objectives. I then had another model paragraph ready, cut up so they could piece it back together. Turns out I had used the same paragraph for both activities, making the latter redundant… not my smartest move! However, I felt it was important to be completely honest with my students. They are all aware that I am a trainee teacher, and I feel that they empathise with me and – dare I say it – like me more because of my honesty with them. By treating them with the respect, on the whole, they have been completely respectful to me back. I like the idea that by showing them that I make mistakes, it makes it ok for them to make mistakes too – and that’s important.

After the lesson, I felt elated and relieved. However, the stress has come right back around again…. My PT is observing me with this class again on Tuesday. She is a deputy head, so hopefully they will behave… they definitely had ‘wind syndrome’ today, so I wouldn’t want a repeat of that!

Impostor syndrome strikes again

One of the things that I can’t seem to stop thinking about is how other teachers feel about my teaching. Every teacher seems to have their own personal list about what makes a good lesson, and they only seem to vaguely overlap with main ideas. This leads to me getting very varied feedback and can be completely confusing at times.

The one thing I find particularly hard to deal with, is when teacher’s interrupt my teaching to make a comment to the class. I know it is meant with the best intentions, and I am also completely aware that this is their class, and they are ultimately responsible for their progress – I am a complete risk in the eyes of education.

One moment that has particularly stuck with me this week, was when I was doing a preparation for the end of unit assessment. They were due to plan their assessment with their class teacher on Wednesday, as my PT meetings clash with that lesson, and she has taught travel writing many times before, and has a really clear idea about what she expects. Now, I knew that the students were going to write a piece of travel writing to entertain. We had looked at writing to inform and to persuade as well, and as a result used their ‘FASTER CARS’ acronym for what to include in persuasive writing.

I was taking general feedback about what makes good travel writing. I have been working on how to give students ownership over success criteria and, after spending a lot of time having to shut students down because it isn’t what I want them to come up with, I have found the easiest way to do this is to write down everyone’s answers and then come up with a final list. One of my higher ability students suggested FASTER CARS, and I added it to the board. In my head, I thought ‘great, a lovely little afl piece I can use later, asking them why we wouldn’t include this if we were writing to entertain’. Whilst I was writing this on the board, the class teacher addressed the class, completely shutting down the idea and explaining why that wasn’t going to be the case.

I know exactly why she did it, it just felt awful at the time. I felt completely undermined, more so because she didn’t give me a chance to see what I might’ve done with that information, or even catch my eye to see if it was ok to address the class. Moments like this throw my confidence and make me feel like just a trainee. I know it might sound silly because that is, in fact, what I am. But the majority of the time, as mentioned in my introduction, I do feel like a teacher. It’s just those moments that make me question my role in the classroom. Why am I doing this? Why am I humiliating myself?

Finishing travel writing….

On a slightly better note, I swiftly moved on from that moment and the students wrote their assessments on Thursday. They worked so hard! I have started marking them, based on the English Language Paper 1 Q5 mark scheme and grade boundaries and, so far, everyone has been on or above their target grade! It is such an amazing feeling!

… and starting 19^thCentury Prose round 2

So, after finishing travel writing, which has definitely been my favourite SOW to teach, it was time to move on to 19^thcentury prose. I recycled the introduction lesson, playing the Dickens’ game and research. It was a complete dream planning the second time round – I already had an idea of how to improve my planning, resources and teaching.

This was the sheet I used last time, for the research project:

They also had to find 10 more fascinating facts for homework and print out any pictures they want to use on their posters.

I found that some of this research was not directly relevant to the texts we study, and that it could be more useful to focus on gender and class, as opposed to London. Moreover, I had them take a page in their books and draw their own grid, with the intentions of having it filled in by the end of the lesson. I found that a lot of students spent nearly as long drawing and perfecting the grid than they did actually researching, and that a lot of them didn’t get at least 5 facts in each section – which was my minimum aim.

This is the new resource I created:

I figured that if they had a print out of the sheet, they would be able to take it home to finish off for homework (a fantastic motivating factor!). I also added to this homework, by telling them to find 5 fascinating facts about Bleak House. I am hoping that this will help them to have an idea about what the mammoth novel is about, before approaching it with them next week.

My hard work paid off – this was definitely an easier way to do the research! I also asked them to pair up and split the research, as we didn’t have as much time as I would’ve liked (Friday timings are slightly shorter and I was in a year 10 assembly that ran on for an extra 5 minutes = 10 minutes of lesson time gone… plus we had to actually get to the computer room!). The majority got at least 15 points down, and they worked well together to finish off their research… although they will be dismayed when they see I have put them in different groups on Monday!

Currently Reading:

The Eolian Harp & Kubla Khan – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Kubla Khan is now one of my favourite poems. It is a unique poem, interweaving the ‘sublime’ with the exotic, creating a beautiful Romantic masterpiece.

Bleak House – Charles Dickens

Animal Farm – George Orwell

A Monster Calls –Patrick Ness

More than one tear was shed in the reading of this book – cancer being an illness very close to my heart. I loved reading about a boy struggling with accepting his Mum’s inevitable death. A very accessible book, an easy read but a sensitive topic… may not be suitable for all students!

Week Four: Poetry, Planning and Placement Preparation

Introduction

Another week has flown by, and my head has once again been bombarded by pedagogy – starting placement next week will be a refreshing change! Sitting here on Friday, as I begin to write this blog post, I am looking back over the week and Monday feels like months ago. Yet, at the same time, I cannot quite believe that the past month has passed by so quickly. I am definitely looking forward to relaxing this weekend with a few of my old uni friends!

First Tutorial

We had to sign up for one-to-one tutorials with our tutor last week, and I was eager to get this done as soon as possible, mainly so I could clear my head with someone who knew what was expected of me. We talked for quite a while, and I expressed some of my concerns about getting in front of a class for the first time. I am so used to observing, or acting as a teaching assistant, that I am starting to freak out a bit about making the transition into teacher! She made me feel heaps better about it, and we decided that the best approach for me is to jump in at the deep end and teach sooner rather than later. As much as I hate to admit it, that will probably be the best way for me to get over these ridiculous nerves as quickly as possible! Watch this space… I could be saying a completely different thing next week!

National Poetry Day

I wouldn’t be an English teacher if I didn’t acknowledge that it was National Poetry Day on Thursday! In spirit of this, our lecturers gave us a small anthology of four poems all written by female poets and taken from the current AQA GCSE Poetry Anthology. The poems were:

– The Emigre by Carol Rumens

– Poppies by Jane Weir

– Tissue by Imtiaz Dharker

– Kamikaze by Beatrice Garland

I focused on Kamikaze to begin with, after quickly reading through all four I found I was particularly drawn to the narrative. It follows a story about a Japanese girl’s father, who left to be a suicide bomber but came back, bringing shame to the family. I fell head over heels in love with the poem. The language is beautiful: ‘strung out like bunting on a green-blue translucent sea’; ‘dark shoals of fishes flashing silver as their bellies swivelled towards the sun’; ‘cairns of pearl-grey pebbles’, as well as presenting a powerful thought whether it would have been better for her father to die a ‘hero’ or live but bring shame on her family. I always find it interesting looking at different perspectives on the war, particularly after visiting Laos and seeing the devastation the ‘bombies’ from the Vietnam war, amongst other places.

We were then given the task to work in pairs to create a lesson plan for one of these poems. As much as I loved Kamikaze, the poem my partner and I chose to write the plan for was Tissue. It is such a beautiful poem, and I love the use of homonym ‘Tissue’ and the process of it starting as paper and becoming skin. The more I read it, the more I came to appreciate it. I will explain the lesson plan we made a bit further down.

On National Poetry Day we were asked to get into groups to perform different poems, and we were all given different ways in which we should perform. I won’t go into detail, but it just reminded me how powerful it is to see a poem performed, and how that could be used as a way to get my students to actively engage with the text, rather than just listening to it being read by me.

The Planning Process

We spent a lot of time in our sub sessions talking about lesson planning, focusing mainly on medium term and specific lesson plans. I am going to focus on the lesson plan I created with my partner, and the turmoils we faced whilst we attempted to perfect the timings and activities.

Our initial idea was to explore figurative language in Tissue. We drew upon ideas, decided to do various activities and then hit a brick wall. How where we going to cover everything in a one hour lesson? After getting a bit of help, we realised that it would be more beneficial to us and the students if we were more specific with what we wanted the learning outcomes to be – in other words keep it simple and specific. So we narrowed it down to imagery. Turns out this is just as vague so eventually we narrowed it down to the senses and then our plan took place!

I’m including a picture of our plan, it is hella messy because we changed it heaps, it is also not 100% finished as we discussed a lot but ran out of time to write it down! However, I am confident that we have refined our plan and it is now a teachable lesson. This was also due to, I believe, finally getting a mock up class list so we had an idea of how we could differentiate the lesson. This made it somewhat easier, but I think it will also be a million times easier (note easier not easy) when I know the children I will be teaching well enough to adapt the lesson for everyone. (I know that probably sounds optimistic but we’ve all got to aim somewhere!)

Class Readers

We also had a look at class readers, the text (generally a play or novel) that a class will read together and follow along at the same pace, usually over a few lessons. We discussed various ways to approach class readers and also talked about the advantages and disadvantages of using them.

We then got the first few chapters of Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman, and were asked to try out a few techniques to read them in a group. I think the resounding thing our group found was that, even as literature lovers, we found we got distracted easily for a range of reasons. The text itself was phenomenal and I have definitely decided to put it on my to read list… so why did we find it so hard?

Reading out loud can be a nerve racking thing, everyone slips up now and again and it is easy to get bored if someone is reading too fast or too slow. For me, the best way we did was the ‘popcorn method’, where the reader can nominate anyone to read and each person only reads as much as they want to. This kept us on our toes and, interestingly, we found ourselves picking on our colleagues that did not appear to be paying attention. Now who knows if this is something the children will do or if this is just the teacher within us all making an appearance!

Inclusion and SEN/D

For our first masters level assignment, we will be following ‘learner x’, a pupil with SEN/D (Special Educational Needs or Disability) and we had the introductory lectures to this task this week.

My favourite of the lectures has to be the one where we had people from a SEND department come in and talk to us, bringing along a few students with additional needs. Hearing the students side of their school life really hit home – I know inclusion is important of course, but knowing the little details that could change the child’s day for the worse only emphasised to me that it is of the upmost importance that I get to know my students as well as I can.

I am actually looking forward to this assignment, and eagerly anticipate next week when I hopefully get to meet my learner x.

Observation Versus Judgement

This will just be a brief note here, mainly to remind myself if I ever forget. Observations are what you actually see, judgement is what I think I see. For example, an observation would be that children have their heads down on their table, a judgement would be that these children are not engaged. Use the observations to back up judgments ad explicitly state what I have seen in my assignments – every judgement needs evidence!

First Impressions

Most excitingly this week we got to meet our personal tutors for our first placement, well I say personal tutor, in my case one of the deputy heads came to greet us due to unforeseen circumstances. It was honestly such a relief to be able to have a little chat before starting next Tuesday, and having a few trivial questions answered.

The school I will be working at has a ‘ready to learn’ behaviour management scheme in place, which is basically a zero tolerance method. I am grateful that all the behaviour management is in place for me to use already, as I feel like that is one less thing I need to worry about when I teach for the first time (scary how this is getting closer and closer!). It is also a Catholic school and I am excited to see how faith is integrated into the English curriculum.

Transferable Techniques

Working with a collapsed text: Using all the words of a poem (or any other text) put in alphabetical order and ask the students to create a piece of creative writing only using the words provided. Also, using a word wall – where all the words of a poem (or other text) are blanked out and words are revealed one by one (or however you want to do it).
The ‘popcorn method’ for class readers

Currently Reading:

The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry – Edited by George Walter

Back to the world war poetry again, I think I’m gonna alternate each week between this book and the contemporary poetry book. One poem that particularly stood out to me this week is August 1918 (In a French Village) by Maurice Baring. It is a short poem, only having 2 stanzas, but the contrast between the 2 stanzas was what really grabbed my interest. The first is a beautiful description of village life, and this is juxtaposed with distressing imagery of war and death.

The Tempest – William Shakespeare

I have just begun Act 2 of the Tempest, and I am further reminded of the interesting character of Caliban. I can remember having discussions at school whether he was evil or whether he was merely an innocent being that Prospero is abusing. I also can quite confidently say that I have no idea how the play is going to turn out! To be fair to myself, it has been over 10 years since I last studied the play. I am excited to remind myself about the play and to follow the characters into the unknown for the second time in my life. This just goes to show that rereading a text is never a bad idea!

Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf

The more I read this novel the more I fall in love with it. Woolf is quite clearly an ingenious writer, to cover so much detail over a course of a day is astounding! The part I read this week focuses on Mrs Dalloway’s daughter Elizabeth and how she has her own independent mind. Her relationship with Mrs Kilman is a bit confusing, potentially because I have the bad habit of skim reading, or could be that way on purpose! I am still not sure if Mrs Kilman loves her or is jealous of her… or both! I am also waiting for the climax of the novel… I feel as if there is something building and Mrs Dalloway will be the cause of some great distress. Time will only tell if I am way off the mark or not!

Junk – Melvin Burgess

This book was harrowing. The book follows Gemma and Tar as they both run away from home and go live in squats and, not surprisingly due to the title of the book, become heroin addicts. I don’t want to give too much of the plot away, but the changes you see in the characters – particularly Tar – just emphasises how ‘junk’ can destroy someones life. There were moments where I was nearly brought to tears (probably would have been brought to tears if I wasn’t reading it on the bus!) and it really opened my eyes to how important safeguarding is within a school! (Definitely would have had a different reading if I read this as a teen!) If someone at their school noticed that Tar was being abused at home, would he have run away in the first place? How different would their lives have been?

This is definitely a book aimed at an older reader, with themes such as drug addiction, prostitution, abuse, rape, pregnancy and abortions, a heroin addicted baby, homelessness amongst other things found throughout the novel. I would definitely be reluctant to recommend it to students until I knew they were mature enough to handle these deep issues. Nevertheless, it is a fascinating read and I am intrigued to watch the BBC adaption in the near future!