And the Oscar for Best Actor goes to...

This week I continued with teaching numeracy and taught my first phonics and literacy sessions. While I feel my teaching was an improvement on last week, there is still a lot that I can improve on. Firstly, I still need to be more active and engaging with the children. It has been difficult this week to really be as energetic as I can having come down with something horrific, but it was certainly noticeable that when I managed to man up and carry on, it made a big difference to how the children react. The more of a conscious effort I make to improve this, the more natural it will come across and more readily it will be a part of my teaching persona with the children. The thing is, the more I have to think about what I'm doing, the less focus I have about the little things in the class, so it's a delicate balance as I continue to learn. I'm totally full of respect for Key Stage One teachers, it's a much more physically demanding role I would say, as you really have to put on a performance for the children. Either that or be totally crazy!

The second improvement I need to make is to be much clearer with my objectives. I have already planned for next week’s literacy and started with a ‘Can do’ statement of sorts that will enable me to focus on what it is I want the children to have learned by the end of the lesson, and I can use this objective to differentiate my class more effectively. I think my problems recently have come from confusing myself with a plethora of objectives that are too vague, owing mostly to my lack of confidence with the level of differentiation involved.

Speaking of which, differentiation is my final target for teaching development for the next 5 days, as this week I have struggled to differentiate the class effectively, losing sight of the objectives and not making them clear and explicit to the children. Instead of working from the generic objectives, I should use them as a guide to produced a focussed objective or two from which I can target the learning effectively and hence the assessment will consequently be much easier. Again, it's simply confidence. I'm relying on other sources to help and trying to cover so many bases, but by doing so I'm just losing track of what's important.

On Thursday I taught my first KS1 PE lesson, which I thought went really well. The children were acting as stars on a catwalk, using the various apparatus as precarious catwalks before turning and posing for the waiting paparazzi. They were able to get feedback from the pictures taken around the room as well as peer assessment – I asked children to pick out someone they saw doing something different and interesting. After a fairly difficult week, this really picked me up again. PE isn't one of my strongest subjects, so it's something I've targeted specifically as getting better at. Later in the day, I went to observe a KS2 PE session – Hockey outside – with the aim of taking a group next week with a specific focus. This is an ideal opportunity to reflect on and improve what I learned from KS2 outdoor PE in Y3 placement and I’m looking forward to it. I'm sure by the end of placement I'll be more than happy to take PE whatever the level of the children!

I'm really looking forward to the coming week, and it's an attitude I really should have had from the start. I'm not saying that I've been dreading every day at all, quite the opposite, but after reflecting on my practice this weekend I think that week 3 will be when I really kick into gear and fix what I'm doing wrong. I'm adamant.

Adapting to Change

Credit: Peter Delves Associates

I've been absent from blogging for a month or two for a variety of reasons, but at the moment it's my final placement that's keeping me busy. That being said, it's also giving me an awful lot I'd like to write about and I guess reflecting on the week in a blog would be a handy addition to my more formal weekly review, so why not share what I've learned this week?

I wasn't blogging this time last year, but I'd just come hot off a very successful 8-week placement in a Year 6 class that I enjoyed immensely. I found teaching Year 6 to be something that I felt really suited me. They would understand my use and balance of humour in my teaching  for a start, which made me feel much more comfortable in front of them, in turn removing that 'fear' that children seem to have a sixth sense for and take advantage of. Not only that, but I got a sense that I had really pushed them on in a short space of time by giving  detailed written feedback on their writing and giving them plenty of time to respond to it through their writing or through conversations. I advanced my skills in assessment from almost non-existent to being able to identify the level of a piece of writing to within a sublevel without the aid of the APP grids, and used APP for maths extensively in the last few weeks of practice.

I think this is where the difficulty in balancing out my practice arises, however. I'd become accustomed to the year group - the assessment, the behaviour, the expectations, the teaching style - and while I feel I made immense progress in my professional development, it was only when I looked back at it recently that I'd made progress in a specific area of the profession, for a specific group. I'm not saying my progress was useless, far from it, but the teaching style and  I had developed and felt comfortable with was going to have to change.

So I began my placement in a mixed Year 1/2 class with some trepidation. I say some trepidation, I was genuinely scared. Although I'd had two previous placements in Y1/2, I just wasn't feeling confident (and for those of you that don't know me - that's unusual!) because I knew I'd almost have to start again from scratch. Regardless of how confident I felt, I wanted to get over it and hit the ground running. The more I teach, the more I realise how much there is still to learn. I'm reminded of Rumsfeld's 'known unknowns' speech, but the more I know what I don't know, the more I want to know, you know?

Credit: Jason Bresnehan

The most obvious difference I've come across is just how practical everything has to be and that's something that, although I'm beginning to improve, I am still very much getting used to. The children need something to grab their attention because they don't have developed enough cognitive skills to be able to simply sit there and listen, watch or observe. They need to DO, they need to see things BEING DONE. Words and numbers are relatively abstract concepts at this stage in comparison to my previous experience and my teaching needs to change to reflect this. Early on in my teaching this placement, I have found myself being frustrated by lots of minor behaviour issues, not paying attention, talking, fidgeting, etc. The important thing for my development here is that (mostly) it's not their fault, it's mine. I look back at an activity and think  that instead of showing them on the board, why don't I get them to do it? Why don't I get them to BE the numbers and move them around? Why don't I get one of them to BE the crocodile that eats the bigger number? The more practical I have made an activity, the better I find they respond and engage with not only the learning, but with my teaching too.

Credit: Shawnee State University

The second difference I've noticed is the assessment, which I'm going to have to spend a lot of time getting used to. As I mentioned earlier, I got to grips with APP for literacy and maths where I was assessing lots of written evidence. In key stage one, written evidence is a lot more difficult to produce and so a lot more of the assessment is weighted observationally and through discussion. It's something that is overwhelming me at the moment, but I'm sure as my experience grows I'll look back and think otherwise.

I think experience is a key word here. So far, my experience is limited and in order to be a better teacher, I need more experience, but particularly I need more varied experience. My opinion in the last week or two has changed dramatically from being fearful of the key stage to being excited about learning more. I've realised that in order to become the most complete teacher I can be, I need to fill in as many of the gaps, the 'known unknowns', as possible.

In order to further this, my class teacher organised for me to spend some time in the nursery and reception classes. I thought this would be the ideal opportunity to learn more about where my children had come from in order to teach them more effectively, but I did not realise just how different it was. It seems that teachers are not the only ones that have to adapt - the transition process looks quite jarring if taken in the context of the spring term, before the reception class are preparing for transition and after the year ones have had their transition term. 

I won't go in to too much detail on what I saw, as I wrote a fair old block of a blog post back in May, but what I took away was that I really think that I should go and do some research on the EYFS. How children cope from the free-play, free-choice activities of the early years setting to the more teacher-lead activities in KS1 could be an interesting point to draw upon for my own teaching. Perhaps I might find success in re-introducing more choice into the lessons? The sticking point would be the fact I've got a mixed class - How would the year twos respond? Perhaps I could offer each yeargroup the choice of activity by ability? So many ideas, so many questions, but as yet, so little experience. It's at this point I'm very glad that I can count @trainieteacher and @kforeilly as not just friends, but colleagues too - They've both spent the last 4 years learning about and experiencing EYFS first hand so doubtless I'll be able to draw on them and the community I now feel a part of to help me out. 

If you've managed to read through my wall of text without getting bored, by all means leave a comment - I'd love some suggestions of ideas I could try to help me out!