foolfillment: the blog

At last night’s TeachMeet for students and probationer teachers I gave a 7 minute presentation on my own probation experiences. It was all very self indulgent I thought but people seemed to like it so I’m going to share it here.

I used Prezi for the first time to collect a few images together, last night I saw some really good uses of prezi – while some people think it can induce headaches I saw last night how fantastic it is not to be stuck in a linear presentation.

Here’s the link to the prezi I used, though I fear that on it’s own it won’t make a great deal of sense as it was really just an aide memoire for me. My main points were somthing like this:

• Make sure you get up to the staff room and speak to as many other people as you can. Don’t hide away in your classroom on your own working.
• Observe as many people as you can, it needn’t be formally but just get into classes all over the school if you can to see how other people do what you want to do.
• Make sure you have a life away from school, find a way to switch off and stop thinking school
• Set aside some time each week to get the GTCS housekeeping done, the stuff you need to do isn’t too onerous but if you let it pile up it can be very difficult to get back in top of.
• Spend time reflecting on how you are doing, it needn’t always be formally, just chatting about things with people helps – see the first point.
• Write up loads of mock application forms and get people to read them. Pester other teachers for their opinions. If possile ask people outside of your subject. Do the same for interviews – get loads of previous interview questions and prepare some answers for them, do as many mock interviews as you can.

Far from a comprehensive list but I think doing those things last year helped me.

I’m looking for your ideas in this post.

A quick summary first: Today saw the final training session for this year’s probationers in East Lothian. Training really isn’t the right word for it as it was more an informal afternoon with the focus being on sharing and exploring our ideas about the Learning and Teaching that is going on in East Lothian. There was another focus – recently all the probationers took part in a sector shadow where secondary teachers watched primary classes for a day then swapped over – so this gave a lead to the discussions.

The final activity we took part in was particularly useful – both for sharing ideas but also to justify what we do to other professionals. This is where I’d really appreciate your comments.

There were two headings under which we had to describe something that we think is great practice and we want to implement or continue to do when we take up our next jobs. We then mingled and shared ideas with each other. It opened up my eyes (even further) as to the variety of things that are going on in Primary schools that are just fantastic.

The first heading was Formative Assessment/Learning Strategies.
I wrote something along the lines of: Peer Assessment – evaluating each others work, pupils are much better at praising/criticising each other’s work than their own.

The second header was Management of Learning.
For this I wrote Starter questions/exercises at start of every lesson.

I’d love to hear you share anything that you consider to be essential to good learning and teaching so please leave a comment. It needn’t be much just a few words describing something that you think works.

( I toyed with the idea of writing this as a meme, so feel free to write up on your own blog and link here, or even to tag someone else.)