Personally, semester one really wasn’t what I was expecting. Going into a teaching degree I expected to be thrown into modules about the Curriculum for Excellence and Pedagogical Studies. It was an eye opener for me to see the real focus being on Values and Working Together, although now I completely understand why this is what we are initially taught.
The most valuable module in my opinion was the Working Together, through this I learned so much about what Social Work and CLD actually consist of; it also helped me to break down any previous stereotypes about these two disciplines. This helped me understand why it is so crucial to a child’s wellbeing for the three disciplines to work together, this is a very efficient way to work in lines with GIRFEC. I think this was a very important module and it helped me develop as a professional as it gave me a greater understanding of how the three disciplines work and how I will be working closely with them throughout my career as a teacher. It also made me more aware of real life problems which occur for many children across the country and the initial steps to tackling these. I found the assessment for Working Together very beneficial as it allowed me to gather my own thoughts and link these to theories we had learned, this allowed me to have a better understanding of what we were learning about and how it’s applied. I also found working with people from all three disciplines very beneficial as we were able to share and challenge our opinions and gain a deeper knowledge of everything we had learnt about from different perspectives.
Overall semester one taught me a lot about myself as a professional. It also taught me a lot about how I can apply different practices in the classroom and wider community to help try and improve every child’s quality of life and to try and achieve an equal and fair classroom environment.
