7y1 Lesson 3

At the start of the lesson the laptop that I was given to use didn’t work and my mentor observed that I handled this situation well. Although the students finished the initial task quite quickly I had to give them more time than they needed as I had to give myself time to sort out the failure of technology. Having said that I could have set them a task to discuss their expectations with the person sitting next to them.

 I found that I had to clarify a lot of the vocabulary I had incorporated into my lesson, such as turn of the century, and my mentor praised me for doing this. As the issue has been raised that I let the discussion go on for too long I am now trying a technique to limit the number of hands up I have to three. My mentor praised me for coming up with some of my own phrases/sayings “let’s have some hands up”. However, I need to move the discussion on with questioning to get that I want out of them. My mentor has suggested that I need to include a section on my lesson plan to say at the end of each task what I want to get out of my students.

 In hindsight I needed to emphasise the fact that that women at the turn of the century women either became a wife or a governess/spinster, there was no other option. I feel that the content of my lessons are getting better. For example, I was pleased with the way that the media work. I neglected to correct the fact that some students had put their bags on the table. I have been told that I over praise students but I was pleased with the fact that my mentor praised me for picking up for a student’s lovely use of vocabulary “on the other hand”.

There is one student in the room who doesn’t put her hand up and both my mentor and I need to answer the question why? In the group work task, some words were more difficult than others, and I missed an opportunity for differentiation. However, when the students were feeding back their definitions I simplified them to meet the ability of the group. There were six words, which constituted two groups of three and I neglected to mention this.

One thing I need to do next lesson is set this group time limits and give them warnings in order to speed them up. For next lesson I am going to set them up with the date, title and learning objective, as I feel this particular group needs it.