Skip to main content

📝 Weekly Report #21

The trainee teacher in our department has started to teach my Year 10 group this week. It has taken me back to when I was training and the struggles that I had and the feedback my mentor would give me. One thing I didn't consider back then was how the class teacher feels who I was taking over from. 

I know that as a trainee I was no where near being an amazing teacher but over time I have continually improved. So it has been a struggle for me to allow the trainee to teach my class thinking that there would be aspects that I know I could deliver much better. On the flip side of this it has been great to learn from him by watching him teach and being able to give small steps to improve for next time. The initial focus has been on general pedagogy, e.g. use of questioning, planning for misconceptions etc. It's made me reflect on my own teaching ensuring I don't just talk it, I walk the walk too! I've also enjoyed seeing the improvements he has been able to make lesson on lesson so far because of my feedback. I'm sure we will be able to have more conversations based around subject knowledge and the best representations, questions, examples etc to use. 

🔊 Listen:
Five best bets for teaching and learning with Jon Hutchinson. Jon talks about some easy wins that we can put in place to improve student progress. Listen here. 

🔊 Listen:
Too often we are caught saying yes and end up overloaded with work. Greg McKeown talks about how to say a graceful no. Have a listen here.

📚 Read:
Consistently making small steps of progress over time end up looking like giant leaps to those who haven't seen the work being put in. Read the post on Farnam street here. 


Labels

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Literacy in Maths

I'm a Maths teacher, I teach numbers. Why is Literacy so important for me? Well….here's why: "Literacy is fundamental for success in school and later life. Students who cannot read, write and communicate effectively are highly unlikely to access the challenging academic curriculum in secondary school and are more likely to have poor educational outcomes across all subjects." (Link 3)  Unfortunately there are a lot of Maths teachers who believe (wrongly) that literacy is a thing that the English department do. They see it as a tick box for observations. Rather than being an essential component of students being able to learn maths.  -  So what does it look like in Maths? Answer the question: Blindle 4x + 6 Are you able to do it?  This is the challenge a lot of students face in Mathematics. Subject specific vocabulary can seem really confusing to a lot of students. Understanding what a keyword is asking of students is often the hardest part of a question and can hold s...
Read more

📝 Weekly Report #33

This week I listened to a really good podcast episode from Greg McKeown called Where am I wrong? In it he talks about a really effective method to have deeper discussions on what is important.  Write down/say the 3-5 issues/priorities you think there are as well as the cost/consequence of them. Then just simply ask where am I wrong? It starts the conversation off with the other person talking and getting their points across. You can then get that shared understanding about what needs to be done and why.  It got me thinking about other areas this could be useful for e.g. dealing with conflicts, leading departments/teams, pitching a new initiative. I am going to start doing this in some of these scenarios as I think we can have more productive conversations from it.  Have a listen to the episode here .  🔊 Listen: Alan Stein Jr on the Modern Wisdom podcast discussing high performance and overcoming stress. He talks about thinking like an athlete with your work and impr...
Read more

📝 Weekly Report #9

👨‍🏫 Teaching : Have done a lot of thinking this week about the tasks I set students. Mark McCourt put a wonderful tweet out listing the different parts of a learning sequence for students. See tweet here . It nicely puts into words some of the ideas I was thinking about myself. I then also listened to Craig Barton's podcast with Tom Francombe and they spoke about giving students tasks that distract their attention but have them practicing the skill taught in the lesson. From this I have been writing tasks and noticing other tweets with exercises on that distract student thinking. So for the next half term one of my focus points is on creating and regularly using these distraction tasks in lesson.  🔊 Listen : Walter Isaacson on the Knowledge project discussing Creativity. He talks about how some of the most creative people of all time, Davinci etc, immersed themselves in learning as much as they could and then linking things together. So tying the art knowledge to his engineering...
Read more