Friday

Reflection on 8y4 lesson

I am a little bit disappointed with the way this lesson went. I think that the LO should have included the word empathy as opposed to sympathy. When I am planning I need to think carefully about how the tasks link to the learning objective. With this particular group I am at the stage now where I need to think about medium term planning. On the first task of the main part of my lesson I should have rephrased the writing frame to ‘a journey’ as opposed to ‘the longest journey’ and if I teach this lesson again I will do that. In this instance I also missed an opportunity to embrace EAL (English as as Adiitional Language). I also need to make the students aware of the purpose of their writing and not just set them with writing tasks. Having said that, I have clearly created a safe learning environment with the students as they were all willing to read out loud and share their writing. Also, I feel that I made good use of praise in this lesson.

Reflection on 10y2 lesson

I thought that task one work very well as it engaged the students and got them working straight away. I am concerned about E and E’s behaviour and especially E D’s inappropriate conversations in lessons. I am also concerned about Em and Z (and to a lesser extent) as they do not seem to be completing much work. I looked through Z’s prep book when she came for a detention on Monday and there didn’t appear to be much in there. Also, I am worried about the progress of A. Rich did say that she was one of the weakest in this class, but today is the first evidence I have seen of this. I changed the second task slightly into are the words on the PowerPoint positive or negative and this seemed to have a far greater impact on the students. The lesson was very positive and I was pleased with the learning outcomes. I’m thinking that I might give the students with higher target grades the option of writing their controlled assessment on Curley’s wife.

12E 'cover' lesson

The Head of the Department (HOD) asked me to ‘cover’ a lesson whilst she did an observation. She had given the girls a poem each and asked them to create a power point about that poem. I was merely there to facilitate. On reflection I should have asked the girls to read the poems out instead of letting the class read the poems by themselves. Other than that I thought the lesson went fine.

Formal Observation 15th November 2011

What I said:

During the starter the students were asked to write one sentence about the impression they got from the first reading. Some students did this but when I ask for feedback they added to their sentences. A strategy for this is to make the students write the sentence on a post it note and/or give the students thinking time to formulate their ideas. I forgot to highlight the extrinsic information for the poem Easter Monday and I’m a bit frustrated because I noted this in the planning under task 3. I was a bit disappointed with the way the groups work, as when I observed them working last lesson they work really well. This lesson one group left all of the work down to one group member so weren’t very productive or inclusive. The observer, as many other observers have picked up on my verbal feedback and in particular my praise. For next lesson I need to justify why something is lovely and not just say it’s lovely!

What the formal observer said:

Subject/Topic:  English- Poetry, detailed planning provided along with reference materials to be shared with students

Relationship with Pupils

Joanne has a calm, professional manner with the students. She was well organised and made her expectations of behaviour clear. She gave her students the opportunity to give both individual and collaborative feedback. Student contributions were valued and were often used to develop learning further. Joanne is developing rapport with the groups as she begins to know the individual students better.

Teaching and Learning

Joanne’s subject knowledge was secure and she scaffolded the learning well by providing a number of useful resource materials which will support the students through the poetry unit. She responded well to the students’ questions and was able to clarify misunderstandings well. The content was relevant and well sequenced although more could have been done to provide extrinsic background information to support the theme of the poem. This would have provided more opportunities to review the poem in the light of its social, cultural and historical context. Sharing this information was noted in the planning document, but was not shared with the students. The idea of students summarising their responses to the poem in one sentence was a good one but, in the feedback, only a few students were able to do so. It may be valuable to give silent thinking time ahead of the feedback giving the students clear expectations of a succinct and specific response. Collaborative group work was used well although some groups were more inclusive and productive than others. There could be opportunities for focused observations of Assessment for Learning during group sessions.

Classroom

Classroom management and organisation was good and resources were purposeful and well prepared.

Areas of Strength Good subject knowledge Developing rapport with pupils Developing good timekeeping – plenary needed more time A range of strategies for managing behaviour Well-prepared lesson - use of IWB, well organised resources Good strategies for learning- range of strategies employed to support and develop learning Good routines, clear code of conduct.

At this point the trainee was:                                              Well above the Standard  (1a) Exceeding the Standard  (1b)                       x Meeting the Standard (1c)                        x      Working towards the Standard  (2)                        Displaying significant weaknesses  (4)

1b awarded for planning, preparation and organisation, sound subject knowledge and the use of a range of teaching strategies to support learning. Targets for development: ·         Making verbal feedback more specific - if a student’s contribution is ‘lovely’ why has it been identified as such by the teacher? More analytical feedback would provide further learning opportunities. ·         Using collaborative group work as an assessment opportunity for the teacher.

Professional Standards observed Professional attributes: Q1, Q2, Q3b, Q4(part), Q5, Professional Knowledge and Understanding: Q10 (part), Q14(part), Q17(part), Professional Skills: Q22 (part), Q23 (part), Q24, Q25a (part), Q25b, Q25c (part), Q25d, Q30 (part).

10y2 Lesson 4

Once again I overestimated the amount of tasks in this lesson and we only got to task 6 of 8. This was because the students did not know much of the media terminology and spent a lot of time copying down the terms. In future I will give them a worksheet with the key terms on. The class discussion was good and but I had to pick on students to read the text as they would not volunteer. I maybe need to think about the learning environment I am creating in order to combat this. I set the students a lot of homework (again) and am starting to panic as the controlled assessment is approaching fast and I’m concerned that the students are not going to be ready for it. My behaviour management was good. For next lesson I need to work on pace and differentiation for K

10y2 Lesson 3

I had to incorporate a must, should, could learning objective in this lesson because I was being observed by a member of SLT and this is a departmental strategy for differentiation. I felt the starter worked really well and engaged the students straight away. Whilst planning this lesson I was struggling with timings and put too many activities into the lesson plan. Therefore, the plenary of the lesson changed to filling in their tables using the information that they had written about and for homework I put photos of the other groups work on the blog, and they were to complete their tables using that information. I am looking to stretch the students targeted with an A by putting questions relating to context onto the blog. From being formally observed by DT the previous day one of my targets was to assign roles of responsibility whilst doing group work. I put this into practice in this lesson and I felt it was very effective. The things I need to consider for next lesson are pace and differentiation.

10y2 Lesson 2

I found giving the students verbal feedback on the work I had read on the blog quite a difficult thing to do, and I feel this is something that I need to practice. I also struggled to verbally warn those students that hadn’t done the homework. I really like Rich’s technique of splitting the learning objective into a skill and the topic. This lesson gave me the opportunity to practice my modelling skills and I felt it went okay, but if I did it again I think I would use input from the class to write a PEE in front of them using the whiteboard. I had lots of questions about the worksheet that I had created for the students and this suggests to me that if I use this resource again it needs to be improved. I don’t think this lesson was as effective as it could have been and I let Ellie and Ellie sit next to each other which didn’t help with my behaviour management. All in all this was an okay lesson, but I still have lots to learn!

9y1 Lesson 4

I thought the lesson was very noisy and this concerned me as Henri couldn’t hear her group. The other thing was I realised that I was shouting down the radio aid. I thought the introduction worked well and the students gained a lot out of it. I thought my explanation of the debating structure was fine but I put too much information on the PowerPoint Presentation which put some of the students off the active listening task. I thought by letting the students choose one person that they wanted to work with was fair and the rest of their group was made up by chance. The students really struggle with working in silence and I said this is something that we will work on every lesson until they get the hang of it. The snowballing of ideas worked really well (individual, pairs, groups). However, I neglected to tell the students about timings and proposition, opposition, proposition, opposition structure. I need to do this next lesson. One student that was on report misbehaved during the lesson and I gave her a poor for working to the best of her ability. I think this was justified.