It is the end of my first week back to university and prior to my first placement I have been looking into the Standards For Provisional Registration (SPR). Looking into the standards has helped me to make some initial decisions on my first placement goals.
I have taken into consideration different types of goals for the upcoming placement and have decided that I would like to have a mix of both personal and professional goals to develop over the duration of my placement. I have made this decision so I can work on both myself as a future teacher and the work that will be required of me as a teacher.
Through the reading which I have done I have decided that my first goal will be for my personal development and it will be “to have confidence in myself at all times”. I think this is important because if I do not believe in myself I cannot expect my mentor, tutor or any other person relying on me to do so either. Being confident in myself will allow me to:
- create successful partnerships with those around me
- develop my own ability to control and look after a class
- allow me to help the children in my class safely
There is a huge list of achievements I will take from a growing confidence over placement and above are some examples I hope to achieve.
The professional goal I would like to achieve during my upcoming placement is time management and organization. These achievements will allow me to create successful lesson plans which will lead to lessons going to plan with back up arrangements already in place so there will be no panic for me. This will be helpful on placement as the class pupils will be able to tell if I have not taken care into my lesson planning as I will experience anxiety if something goes wrong and they will potentially not learn from the lesson.
In the weeks coming up I hope to consider more options for goals for my placement so that I can choose the best set of goals before starting my placement.
I think these are really good goals. I would suggest, if you haven’t already done this, to use the SMART goal setting – there are loads of resources online (e.g. https://www.projectsmart.co.uk/smart-goals.php) that explain this. The important thing is to set small, realistic but specific targets. So when you say you want to be more confident break this down to the small actions you will do.
For example, you will greet the class teacher each morning, and in a friendly but assertive manner ask them to meet, to review/reflect, on the day at a specifc time. My advice on being more confident is not to sit back and wait for things to happen (so be proactive) and also not worry about upsetting people, so say nothing. You cuold practice this, befoe placment, by asking questions in lectures and workshops (i.e. not holding back becasue you are worried about the reaction, what people think, or being ‘wrong’).
See how this goes, and please blog about your progress!