The Crit
11:51 am on the 6th of October, 2006As I prmoised, this is a post about the assessed lesson I had on Thursday.
First of all I’ll explain that I got a Grade B. I know that’s about all of you want to know - formative assessment? Throw that out the window, just get a mark written down.
There is of course more, the grade is little more than something to take forward so that the Uni can award a level of degree - that’s what uni’s all about, the categorising of students in to one of three levels or failures. Great Stuff. The problem being that all people talk about afterwards is what grade you get, nobody cares what you did well or not so well. Thankfully though, the tutors always give a long session of feedback and discussion about all aspects of how the lesson went. The grade is just a throw away comment at the end.
Perhaps a little background, I was taking an S4 class for a lesson on the Design Process, Aesthetics in particular. This is a hard topic to get a good lesson on because most of the kids - in any school - just want to make things, they don’t want to waste time thinking about how to make them look good.
So, I took the lesson, it went pretty well, the kids were behaving absolutely perfectly - and that was what made me come undone. Which is odd, usually you’d want them to have impecable behaviour. Problem was, this was totally unexpected and meant that the class worked well and completed all the tasks they were given - they cleaned me out of extra work. Darned inconsiderate of them really!
What was good about it? There must have been a lot I suppose, I got a B after all and most of the criteria were marked towards the top end of the scale. I got them in and settled, gave them a little intro. Tried doing some quiet thinking time with them and got reasonable answers from them. All was going well and they took to the task well.
What was bad? A few things weren’t as good as they could have been, I meant to draw their attention to the aims of the leson at the start but forgot. I gave them a task that was rather open ended and with no time focus on it - I would have been better served if I had started them on the first bit and given them 10 minutes, say, to do it then moved on. I relied on oral descriptions for some of the terms where it would have been not much time at all to introduce some form of graphical representation of them. When it got to the point where there was 20 minutes left and most of them were finishing up, I handed out a homework sheet, I could have grabbed the chance to talk through that, explain in more detail the content of it - and some of it needs extra explanation - and used the time for them to work on that.
These things fall into a couple of different categories I suppose: Things I could have foreseen and planned around; things that it takes a few years experience to get good at. The bit about spending time on homework I didn’t think up - that was pointed out to me by the tutor so that falls into the latter category. The bit about reliying on oral explanations is definitely in the former, I could easily have spent mroe time explaining colour choice with some pictures but I just didn’t think of it because I was too focussed on moving them onto the task.
What now? I relax! I can get on with the business of teaching other classes. The crit situation creates a totally false environment and everyone can tell. It isn’t a tru display of hwo you teach. Having said that, it shows very clearly that if you put the effort in to a good lesson and prepare thoroughly then the kids notice and respond positively to that. If you come in and make up something on the hoof then they react in the opposite way. Doing things on the hoof might work for teachers with a few years under their belt and a bank of lessons they know work, but for an NQT or student then this doesn’t work.
It’s given me lots to think about which is good, and it is a reassurance that I’m not totally hopeless, but for now I just want to do something other than think crit crit crit all the time. Time to relax.
Thanks if you’ve read this far, feel free to comment about your own experiences or advice. As usual for here this post is more a cathartic exercise for me than something interesting for the readers but any responses are hugely appreciated because they add to the whole exercise.
