1st week of December - A student teachers dilema - reflections on the week

As I mentioned last week my ability to organise continues to be tested......as Jan and Richard advises..... make sure you integrate and be part of a team at your placement, help, be supportive and listen to advice and stay out of the politics ....right of course !........and this has happened and I am enjoying myself and I think my colleagues are welcoming of me at Brecon. The dilema I have is maintaining this and not upsetting someone, why, well up to now I have had six invites to Xmas parties from varying departments, plus the Uni get together and with my inability to organise (bit of an excuse as I am a home bird really) it's inevitable that I will miss most of these. I am sure I won't upset anyone.......will I ?

I found the classroom time this week to be very rewarding. It was a case of 'best laid plans' for the first class BTEC business. I had a PPP prepared about activities on business sector alignment. This was great and I felt confident in my preparation and had considered the level of learning of the students and their depth of key skills awareness. I had considered my strategy and the methods to adopt and even had a plan to cover one to one tutoring with the less able in the group (all from initial diagnostics carried out the previous two weeks).............great did it happen this way? no it did n't . The main reason was that the classroom changed and I had to teach in a computer suite without any projector facilities...great ! well why did I find it rewarding? I decided to organise the class of 13 around one of the terminals and go through the session in a 'focus group' format and it worked very well. The engagement and behaviour from the students was excellent and the learning outcomes were all achieved, tasks and assessments of understanding were done as the one group (as we were all sat close together) through Q&A and individual learning and inclusion worked as I had the less able sat near me and as such I was able to have much more eye contact and reinforcement of understanding with them. Enjoyable!

Research methods in sports science also went well with the pedagogy through PPP and a developmental task. The task went well and the output from this task (Data Analysis techniques) will provide for future lesson findings and case study build. The down side of the lesson was the behaviour of one or two of the students which resulted in me having a harsh word with them in front of the class. On reflection I was maybe too assertive and could have handled it on a one to one. Having said this my mentor was supportive of my action on the basis that a core of students in the class need to see firm handling of disruptive behaviour.

Another week over still enjoying, still learning and still broke!........another reason why I will miss some of the Xmas parties