foolfillment: the blog

With only two weeks to go until the new term, I’m feeling a lot more relaxed than I did this time last year. That may turn out to be me being foolhardy, as in so many ways I’m in a very similar situation. I’m about to start at a new school that I barely know, with colleagues and pupils I’ve not really met properly, except this year I have a full timetable and I don’t have weekly meetings with a supporter and the safety net of calling myself an NQT (except I think that term applies more now more than last year). Of course the big difference is this year I have a huge amount more experience and confidence to draw on.

Doug Belshaw wrote a great post last night, 4 quotations that will guide me next academic year, and it focussed my thinking a little. I’ve had loads of ideas running through my head ever since I got the job at Hawick about what I want to try and achieve. It’s easy to go into a department for just a few minutes and think that you can make changes, when of course you never get the full picture in such a short visit. There’s loads of good practice going on in Hawick and while I want to make changes and do a lot of my own things my first aim is to really make the most of the experience that is there already. Here’s another quote for you, one that has been all pervasive in my year at East Lothian : “We learn from our experience…..if we reflect upon our experience” John Dewey.

As I said Doug’s post focussed my thinking a little. Mainly about what I want to do with my first few months at Hawick, and I’ve now got a more organised set of targets. Doug also got me a little more focussed on another idea which I’m working on. I’ll tell you about that in a future blog post, I hope you’ll all be interested in it.

“We learn from our experience…..if we reflect upon our experience” - John Dewey.

I have never been one for doing an end of year, navel gazing post,* instead I tend to be pretty reflective all the time, but now that the new term has begun I’ve found myself thinking more about how things have changed since August. There have of course been huge changes in myself professionally, I have gained a huge amount of curricular knowledge from teaching subjects I’ve not taught before, but it’s all the other areas that have changed the most (as an aside I wonder how many teachers well out of probation ever look at their practice compared to the Standard for Full Registration…) like classroom/workshop management, managing pupil behaviour, and short/medium/long term planning.

It’s the last one I want to pick up on. Last term the only constant was change, and things are continuing to change this term. It’s no doubt the same in every school: staff come and go; people get promotions; but it feels like there has been more upheaval than is normal. We are about to start with a new timetable on Monday and I will be losing a couple of periods a week with 2 of my classes. This means I’m going to have to plan out material for those periods for the foreseeable future. This would be quite a big task normally but this time it’s made more difficult by the fact that it is classes sitting our 2 year Highers - the first time we’ve run them. It means that while we have plans for the courses both long term and short term the classes are still being ironed out as we go to an extent.

I’ll try to let you know how things go, though hopefully you’ll be able to track the progress on the RHSCDT edubuzz blog.

*In fact I always find the New Year quite a bizarre idea, an enjoyable, but bizarre nonetheless. After all it’s just a moment in time, man just happens to have picked this day as the start/end of a cycle he has noticed. Nature itself makes nothing of the date - waves continue to come crashing in, the moon does it’s own thing.

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]