Big changes this year – I’ve given up my TRL so my number of teaching hours has shot up, plus I’m no longer teaching SMART, so I’ve gone from seeing one year 7 class 8 times a fortnight, to teaching 6 out of 10 year 7 forms once a week!
What went well
- Pretty pleased with most of my lessons. In particular I think I’ve got a good variety of tasks, with students doing more writing – but for purpose, and I’m getting at integrating numeracy into the curriculum. I think my lessons are generally much better connected into larger enquiries and I hope students are understanding the reasons why we’re learning things as well as just what we’re learning.
- Teaching the GCSE History Pilot for the second time through is much easier than the first time through, because I’ve got the shape of the thing in my head and I’ve learned from the issues that we encountered last year.
- I’m fairly happy with the level and quality of my marking.
- My room looks the best it has done for a while, with load of students work both on the walls and the ceilings. I’m using displays more of a temporary learning station- with large student created posters going up for a few weeks at a time, rather than a more static display of ‘the best’ work.
- Enjoying teaching ICT again, particularly as I seem to be viewing it slightly differently to how I did a few years ago – the impact of SMART and changes in my attitude to teaching I suspect.
- Loving being PGCE Mentor. One of the favourite ‘extra’ things I do. Really makes you stop and consider your own practice.
Even Better If
- Need to continue to look for opportunities for variety – particularly outside my own preferences. In particular ways of integrating more body SMART.
- Still need to find time to mark when the stuff comes in – there’s always something ‘better’ to do and so it builds up. This will become more of an issue as the coursework marking builds up this half term
- My class blog has had a bit of use, but I’m not really integrating it in the way I’d hoped I would. I suspect this is partly because the impact is largely unseen and so it still isn’t automatically becoming part of the routine. To address this I’m going to try and make sure that this week I post all homework tasks on to the blog – and show them on the projector for students to add to their planners. I’m also going to use it more to show off work – I’m going to have a go at turning my year 7 classes half term homework into a series of e-books and posting them there.
I’m currently getting my classes do their report on me for our first half term. I’ll post their views later in the week!
Glad to hear that it has gone well. Are you mentoring History or ICT?
History. Only got two hours of ICT, but it’s quite nice to get a feel for it again!