foolfillment: the blog

I’ve written about this topic before, next year after I have graduated I get a job in a scottish school for one year as part of the NQT induction scheme, where I go is a bit up in the air.

There is a system where I pick my 5 preferred councils and I am hopefully placed in one of them and then there may be some element of choice of which school within the council I go to. The other option is the Preference Waiver Scheme where I could be placed anywhere in Scotland with the bonus of £6k (less tax).

On Friday there was a fayre held at uni for all the people who will be going into the induction scheme next year with most of the councils attending. Until recently I was tempted to go for the preference waiver scheme because £4.5K sounds like a fair whack when you’re a student, but I don’t know if I like the idea of the desicision being completely out of my hands and £4.5K isn’t really that much when weighed against the possible costs of starting out in a place I don’t want to be.

Needless to say this has been on my mind a lot over the weekend but I am no closer to being able to make a final decision yet - there are too many factors here to consider so I have just ruled out a lot of places simply on gut feeling because that’s as good a way as any without going and visiting them all. My main prefererence is somewhere nice and quiet that has a good reputation for it’s induction scheme. So far, based purely on my idea about the place itself and not education, I have narrowed 32 councils down to these ones in no particular order.

• East Lothian
• Borders
• Highlands
• Dumfries and Galloway
• Argyll and Bute
• Perth and Kinross
• Moray

(more…)

Today was my last day at school. The next time I walk into a school (to teach at least) I will be getting paid for it, and expected to produce some results, it’s quite a daunting thought.

I’ll not think about that much now though, for now I’ll concentrate on the fact that the last 10 weeks have been absolutely fantastic, there have been highs and low, laughter and tears (not mine though), and a huge amount of learning. Even though this blog os anonymous in terms of what school I was at I’d like to still thank everyone who is at that school, especially the technical department, who have been brilliant from start to finish with lots of support and advice (and no fear of just pushing me in front of a class and leaving me to it) for me about how to get ahead in this game. I was humbled this morning when having produced the obligitory cakes for the staff the PT brought out a bottle of wine for me - Thank you, you needn’t have!

I also bumped into a PGCE student on the way home and made the connection with this blog that he’s started writing - probably as a result of David and Ewan.

It’s been a very quick and tiring 9 weeks of teaching but now it’s back to uni, head down and batter my way through the other hurdles between me and graduation. Before that though I’m going to the Kelvinhall climbing wall to teach some freshers how to climb 10′ using only a rope and some clever metalwork - known as SRT to those in the know.

Part of the school placement system on my course is that we produce a number of full lesson plans for for lessons we have taken.

I don’t feel submitting these plans has much benefit on it’s own - writing up lessons plans like these ones is bit of a false thing, what is being tested is not the ability to come up with a good idea for a lesson and carry it out well but rather analyse every detail about the pupils and their needs. You would never find a practising teacher spending their time filling out a 1000 word plan under sections headed ‘Previous Knowledge of Pupils’ or ‘Plans for Differentiation’ for each and every lesson they take. It’s not that they aren’t bothering, it’s just that it isn’t worthwhile writing it up and adapting it after each time you see a class.

I’ll submit all the lesson plans in the form they are asked for but I think far more important is a piece of reflection written after having taken the lesson looking at how it went and how I could improve. A piece like this isn’t asked for but I think it is far more beneficial than most of the other content so I’m going to add it in at the end of each plan anyway.

[tags]lesson plans, teaching, reflection[/tags]

Ollie has just finished uploading his presentation from the SAGT conference - 50 Ideas in 50 Minutes. There’s some really good stuff in it that doesn’t just relate to geography teachers so it’s an excellent resource. It’s over on google video and he’s even gone to the trouble of putting it on veotag with chapters. I really like the photo of himself he’s used at the start - it makes it look like he’s got the biggest feet in the world!

Free OS maps for 11 year olds

This is an excellent sceme where every 11 year old in the UK is entitled to a free map, as long as their school signs up, I wonder how many schools don’t bother.

from today’s Scotsman

I spent most of today putting together a short film I might use in school next week, I’ve been thinking about using something similar for my last ever crit in two weeks. I’ve said before but Camtasia is incredibly easy to use, the only barrier I faced was having to use a webcam to capture the video - it meant the quality isn’t great and setting up a way to hold the webcam on the scene was the nightmare in the photo here.

Anyway, go and watch it and let me know what you think, I’d really appreciate any feedback.

(Unfortunately the quality on this youtube version isn’t as good as the original but it gives a fair representation)

Graphic Communication, You Tube, Camtasia, Rendering

My third year Graphics class are sitting a test tomorrow morning on Sectional drawings. It’s a bit of a milestone for me - this is the first topic I have taught to a class from start to finish with no, or little, input from the regular teacher. The drawing they’ll be doing tomorrow is really quite complicated but I think I’ve prepared them well for it.

Graphics is a good subject for assessment most of the time - doing a drawing is something that is hard to make entirely quantitatively (is that actually a word or have I just made it up?) assessable, and it certainly isn’t a regurgitation of facts. In this case it is a very good drawing for prompting thought and building up in a mind how the rules fit together. It will also be a good drawing to see how well the pupils have progressed as it contains a number of tricky things that they should be able to do now.

I’m quite excited to see how they get on.

While I know that the degree I am studying for is worth very little as a degree, I am really happy to be taking what I know into schools - for the simple reason that I will be able to teach 5 subjects* which have a huge range of skills and knowledge needed. There is a great balance between vocational skill and more academic theory. The problem that goes along with having such a range in one department though is having to fit all these different subjects into a relatively small number of rooms.

My pet hate at the moment is people sitting down to do practical work - it isn’t safe and it makes too easy to mess up the work - but the stools are an evil nescessity in the craft rooms because a lot of the time there is written work to be done. Gone are the days of having huge departments with enough rooms to take your class to either writing desks or to benches. The school I’m at currently doesn’t have the space to keep them out the way all the time so time is spent at the start of every lesson getting the stools moved to one side, then all through the lesson you have to go round howking them from underneath the lazier pupils, it gets pretty tiring. Any suggestions out there? Also, Chris wrote a very interesting post about PTs versus Faculty Heads today.

* Craft and Design, Graphic Communication, Technological Studies, Product Design, and Practical Craft Skills

As 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.

A quick post. I’ve spent today editing lesson plans and things like that, but also putting together a sort of overview of what wikis are and how they could be useful in education - this is for the students who will be helping me with my research in my final year project. While doing this I remembered the lecture that Ewan McIntosh did at Jordanhill in January on web2.0. I went back and watched it again, this time the one of the actual presentation not the one done afterwards. It’s made me think again about how I can use these things in the classroom. But will I have the chance, will I be able to do these things when I have my own classes? I really hope so but it won’t be until at least probation year - it won’t happen this placement because there just isn’t trhe flexibility in the course (mine - not the pupils’).

I’ve also been playing with carbonmade after Ollie and Ewan (again) talking about it last week. It’s interesting, doesn’t have any two way features that I’ve seen but it could be fantastically useful in schools. Royal High School already has a geat website showcasing the best work to come out of its tech dept but carbonmade could make it easy for all the pupils to do the same - can you imaginge the feeling that kids would get if people looked at their work and talked about it. I’d love to get something set up with the people in my year so that we could set up a reciprocal link - encourage my classes to look at the work of their’s. A similar thing with real people, I know peopl doing industrial design at uni - what if that sort of person commented on a fourth year’s Craft and Design Folio?
Anyway a very quick post with a distinct lack of insight - I’ll come back to this tomorrow.