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)

Week 14 – Placement 2 Preparations

Introduction

Back at university again this week, although it has been lovely to see all my colleagues, I can’t help but miss being in school… that’s why I’m doing the course after all! However, despite feeling completely exhausted and pretty unwell, I have enjoyed some of the things we have been doing.

Reflecting on Placement 1

As anticipated, everyone was full of anecdotes from their first placements and we spent a fair bit of time reflecting on our placements using a visual metaphor. I opted for a bungy jump, focusing on the nerves before the placement, the lows, the highs and saying goodbye. I didn’t quite get a chance to finish it, colouring in takes a long time! Yet, I got the main points down before we got a chance to go around and see the metaphors everyone else had created, commenting using post its. It was a lovely way to bring our first placement to a close before we found out where we would be placed for the long placement.

Mental Health in Schools

As part of the EPS lectures this week, we had a session on mental health in young people and how we can build strategies to help support our students. This was fascinating for me, particularly as, when I was at school, there were many of my peers struggling with their mental health – including myself – and it never got picked up on by anyone. I struggled by myself for a long time and I know now, after sharing with some of my friends, I was not alone in my feelings. However, when I was at school mental health was nor normalised and actually, I didn’t know that what I was feeling was an illness.

There are many things, such as academic stress, bereavement or bullying amongst others, that can trigger poor mental health. Teachers, due to the amount of time they spend with students, may be the people who pick up on these things, thus have a responsibility to help a struggling young person.

Personally, I feel as if all of this was very similar to the safeguarding lecturers – if I have doubts about any of my students, I will voice these doubts to the appropriate people. However, what I have taken from this lecture is that I need to model appropriate behaviour to my students and I also need to ensure my classroom is a safe space, talking about mental health (particularly in tutor time) to normalise it.

A-Level English Language

We were lucky enough to have an expert in A-level English language come to speak to us this week and it brought back all the amazing memories I have from taking the course myself way back when. We were looking at word classes and linguistic terminology – including a bit on phonetics – and I wish I had been feeling well enough to completely engage in the task. I love this stuff! It also reminded me to send my uni notes to my cousin… something I have been promising since September!

The Science of Learning 2

Following on from his previous lecture about engage-build-consolidate, we had the professor in to give us a specific seminar in how we can relate that to our subject – more specifically the use of creativity.

In a nutshell, different environments can help to stimulate different responses to learning. For example, generally one may expect to find a learning environment that increases focus, offers rewards and has an element of mild stress, potentially through anticipating assessment. However, when doing creative tasks, it is actually more beneficial to have a disruptive or broader focus, less stress and only use evaluation after generating ideas. This is in an attempt to move away from the automaticity usually expected for students to consolidate their knowledge, thus being able to apply this knowledge in different ways (moving up blooms taxonomy).

It’s been a while since I did anything remotely scientific, so at first these lectures appear a little intimidating, but actually this approach makes a lot of sense and will hopefully help me plan lessons in a more useful way!

2 More Assignments

People who say the PGCE year is intense and stressful weren’t kidding – the workload is ridiculously high, and I constantly have waves of imposter syndrome and feeling completely overwhelmed. Every colleague I spoke to this week feels pretty much exactly the same, so I am so glad that we are in this together, providing support when we all need it. Such a lush cohort!

On Monday we submitted the assignment on SEND, I finished this last Friday and relished in having a completely free weekend. By Thursday we had another two assignments left and I was kinda wishing I could Groundhog Day last Saturday. Nevertheless, I am actually looking forward to doing both assignments.

The EPS assignment is a research-based task, and we can pretty much choose to research whatever we want, as long as it relates to one of the teacher standards. My two ideas are:

Looking at something to do with looked after children (LAC) and ready to learn/ behaviour management techniques (influenced by my last placement!)
Looking at something to do with gifted and talented sixth form students

I honestly don’t know which one I would rather do! I spoke to my new PT about this on Friday; she says I will definitely be able to do the second but will need to look into whether there are enough LAC in the school.

The subject assignment is to design your own scheme of work, basing it within selected pedagogy, teaching and reflecting on it. After speaking to my AT, and class teacher, I think I will be doing Animal Farm with the bottom set year 10s. Should be interesting to do from a differentiation perspective!

Placement 2 Induction

I met my PT for P2 on Thursday afternoon, and she seems completely lovely and so supportive (I have heard lots of good things from my colleague who went there for P1). It is a very different school to P1, which I am excited about as it will hopefully give me a completely different teaching assistant. On paper, it sounds a lot like my own school experience – I am most excited about getting sixth form classes!

With regards to what I will be teaching, I have already got a provisional timetable and will have 4 sixth form lessons to teach as well – to be confirmed by January. The classes I will definitely be taking are:

10C2 – Tutor group: not teaching this group this time, hopefully I will build up just as good a rapport as I did with my year 8s in P1!

10×5 – Looking at the power and conflict poetry anthology before half term, animal farm afterwards. A bottom set which will be interesting after coming from all mixed ability!

9×5 – Travel writing before half term, 19^thCentury literature afterwards.

9Y5 – 19^thCentury literature before half term, travel writing afterwards.

6^thform classes to be confirmed.

I am particularly excited to be having two year 9 classes (side note: I observed a lesson with 9X5 today and they are lush, got into a full-blown conversation with a couple of girls about harry potter and the hunger games… I love them already!), my AT gave me the choice of teaching the same thing side by side or doing two different units. I opted to go for two different units, as I know I will learn a lot in teaching each SOW and will be able to put these reflections into good use when teaching the SOW again! I’m excited to have the chance to actually redo the lessons how I see fit, taken on board observation notes.

I am not gonna lie, I am completely nervous to be starting at a new school, even after going in for a day. Everyone seems so lovely and it seems like such a lush school – the kids appear to be beautifully behaved the majority of the time! It’s crazy to think that I have only had a week’s break from teaching – I already feel like I am not sure what I am doing: it’s like the bungy jumping metaphor, no matter how many times I go to start again I will always feel like I am standing at the top of that bridge waiting to jump. Hopefully all will be well – I have already agreed to teach both year 9s from the first day back… jumping in at the deep end worked last time so I am praying it will work again!

Transferable Techniques

Getting A-level English Language students to go through the mark scheme with three different coloured highlighters for nouns, verbs and adjectives. Looking through the bands to see what is expected for each level.

Currently Reading:

The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde

I seem to have misplaced this play…. reading will be on hold until I find it annoyingly!

The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishguro

Still (slowly) ploughing my way through this novel, don’t hate it and don’t love it, not really much else to say on it at this point in time!

Ketchup Clouds- Annabel Pitcher

I love this book! It is about a young girl writing to a murderer on death row, talking about the boy she says she murdered. It is an epistolary novel; written in letters. The form works beautifully for the story line and each letter slowly reveals a new twist in the plot – I am dying to find out who she killed and what happened, and even if it is even her fault.

Over the next few weeks I am going to prioritise reading what I will be teaching, but I will still aim to read for pleasure alongside it! I am determined that the degree will not impact my reading levels, obviously unless I have too much work to do (like last week). I have also been recommended Mortal Engines by one of my year 9s, so I have promptly ordered that and looking forward to reading that after Ketchup Clouds!