Category Archives: 1 Prof. Values & Personal Commitment

The Portrayal of Mathematics

Mathematics is wrongly portrayed throughout people’s lives as a negative subject that only some people have the mind for, whereas, others will never be able to fully think mathematically.

I believe people judge the subject from their own experience with certain teachers and their success in the class. Personally, I had two contrasting mathematics teachers, one was very enthusiastic about the topic, however, was not supportive with those who did not understand the lesson first time. I experienced this and felt embarrassed to ask for help, the result being I did not pass the exam. I opted to sit again with a new teacher who was extremely supportive and was able to explain maths in a way I understood, which created a more positive learning environment, and allowed me to excel in her class and pass the exam. This comparison of teachers led me to discover that it is not always the subject that people don’t ‘click’ with, it could be that the learning strategies set by the teacher aren’t ones that certain pupils find easy to follow. This is important to bear in mind as not all children learn the same ways, and some may require extra help on certain subjects than others.

I will take this learning with me into my professional practice and be as enthusiastic about teaching mathematics as I can. It is not a subject that pupils should be dreading as maths is used in everyday lives and the language is very important to understand.

The Importance of Reflection

Leave a reply

Reflection allows you to acknowledge your strengths and weaknesses so that you can recognise where you can develop, learn and improve your skills. By identifying, through reflection, your skills, behaviour and development areas, you can continue to advance and grow.

Through reflection and analysis of my groupwork experience during my Working Together module in semester 1, I have realised how it has benefited my learning in many ways. I have identified that I need to have the confidence and communication skills to speak out when working with strongly opinionated characters, ensuring that all members of the group are listened to and their opinions respected. Lack of proper communication can lead to confusion, and members disrespecting one another’s opinions. My own future learning will benefit as I will be able to recognise the signs of my group not working collaboratively and step in to make sure we stay on task. My main strength is keeping calm and treating everyone equally, which I will continue.

This reflection has allowed me to think about how the Working Together module has taught me lessons that I can learn from in later life, such as dealing with group tension and personality clashes.

The Importance of Relationships

Leave a reply

Relationships are vital in a child’s development. In school, a happy, healthy relationship has long-lasting academic and social benefits for a person. This means it is the teachers’ responsibility to ensure all children are given opportunities to build relationships with their teachers and peers.

Dr Suzanne Zeedyk spoke about the importance of relationships to a child’s brain development. The living environment a child is raised in will develop their brain to adapt to these surroundings which they are familiar with for the rest of their lives. For example, if a child is raised in a bad living environment with bad relationships, such as a domestically abused home, their brain will be too worried and searching for the next sign of a threat rather than learning. The chemical, cortisol, is released when stressed, and children in bad relationship living situations have a much higher volume of cortisol in their system than other people who were brought up with healthy relationships. Relationships are key in every aspect of our lives because our brains develop due to the relationships that we have with others. Good relationships are critical in the teaching profession because those children who have better relationships with their teacher, classmates or family will feel safer, and more eager to learn in a friendlier and more welcoming environment.

Detective Chief Superintendent John Carnochan spoke about how adaptive babies are, and they will adapt to the environment they live in in order to survive. Relationships are important in the first 4 years of a baby’s life up to the age of 3. This is because “babies need consistency in their life”. However, not all children receive this at home, therefore, they need this support in nursery and primary. “One of the best ways to encourage brain development in a baby, is to smile at them”. As a primary educator, this speaks volumes to me as it shows that friendliness is the best way to encourage learning and good social relationships, which will better a child’s life.

In my professional practice, I will ensure I create a friendly, safe environment for my pupils to learn in and will take the time to create relationships with my pupils, as well as make time to allow them to create relationships with one another through play and groupwork.

The Importance of Dance

Leave a reply

Last week, I took part in a dance workshop for my module ‘Teaching Across the Curriculum’. It gave me insight into how important dance is, how it can be used across different areas of the curriculum and how simple dance tasks can allow children to be imaginative.

Expressive Arts is part of the Curriculum for Excellence. Dance is important as it allows children to express themselves and be creative. Within our dance workshop we were instructed to find different ways to travel across the room, for example, side stepping and hopping. I will use this task when teaching as it would allow the children to have fun, as well as challenging themselves to think outside of the box and create original moves.

Dancing is not everyone’s strong point and some pupils may find it difficult or be embarrassed to perform in front of the class. Within our dance workshop, we were instructed to create our own travel movements, and then to find a partner and share with each other what we had created followed by finding another group of partners to show them what we had learned. In the end, we all had to collate our dance moves to create a short routine which each group presented to the rest of the class. This allowed for individual work, partnership work, groupwork and classwork. I will remember this when I am teaching a class, as allowing the pupils to work with their peers relieves any worry of embarrassment and ensures they have fun while learning.

Dance is used in primary school to promote physical fitness, however, can also be used to aid learning in other curricular areas such as mathematics. We were informed that dance allows opportunities for active cross-curricular learning. This means relating learning to more than one area of the curriculum, for example, the ability to count is required to be able to follow the beat of a dance. I will use this experience in my class lessons in the future and aim to use cross-curricular learning opportunities to allow the children to expand their learning experiences.

From the dance workshop, I have learned that the teaching of dance is important in primary schools as it allows the children to be creative, promotes fitness, increases social skills and can be used to expand their learning across different subjects.

Managing My Personal Learning

Leave a reply

Week 3 – Activity 1 – Managing My Learning

Values Workshop 1 – A task with a lot of meaning.

Leave a reply

I thoroughly enjoyed my first Values workshop. When we entered the class, we were split into four groups consisting of approximately eight to ten people. Each group was then handed an envelope and instructed not to open in until the instructions were read out to us. We were informed that there were objects inside the envelope, and within the first ten minutes of our task we were to come up with an idea of an object that would benefit a first-year student starting at the University of Dundee. My group opened our envelope and poured out the contents; one piece of white paper, a few paper clips, some blue tack, a few elastic bands, a pencil and a pen. At first nobody knew what to say as there wasn’t much that could be made out of such limited resources. There were not many suggestions, however, one that did qualify as a possibility was that the elastic bands could be used as wristbands for buddies to wear in order for the first years to seek out someone if they ever required help, such as directions. After much discussion, as a group, we decided that the best ‘help’ object we could make out of our limited supplies was a map of the Dalhousie building. This was decided as most members of the group admitted they struggled with finding their way around. During our discussion time, my group and I noticed how other groups had been provided with better materials than ourselves. Our advisor stopped our discussions after ten minutes and asked us to build what we had decided using the contents of our envelope.

This task proved a lot more difficult than originally expected as the Dalhousie building is very big and we had only been provided with a small piece of A4 paper. We managed to build some sort of map that illustrated the bottom floor of the Dalhousie building. After another ten minutes, we were instructed to stop what we were doing.

All groups presented their final product and we were shocked to see what two other groups had produced. One had designed a pencil case with all of the essential stationary a first year would need, and another had created a guide to University life in Dundee. The group next to us had opted for the same option as us, a map. Both groups who had created maps of the University of Dundee felt cheated that the other two groups had been given such better commodities to create their final product with.

Finally, our advisor told us what the aim of this task was. It was to illustrate that those who have a lot in life do not notice those who are struggling with so little, however, those with not much notice those who are given more help to achieve their best.

It is important to note how this relates to everyday life. Many children in less privileged schools are aware of the success and positive outcomes at the more privileged schools, however, it is not the same the other way around. The children in the better off schools are not aware of how less privileged schools do not have as much as they do. Overall, I felt the first Values workshop had a powerful meaning behind it and was highly beneficial to take part in.

Identifying My Skills & Abilities

Leave a reply

Task 2 – Identifying Skills and Abilities

My Path to Teaching

Leave a reply

Since buddying the primary ones in my seventh year of primary, I have known I wanted to be a primary teacher. In my third year of secondary, I had the opportunity to do work experience at a school. This confirmed to me primary teaching was the career path I wanted to follow. I loved building relationships with the children, using my skills to gain their trust and finding different ways to support their learning. I thrived with the challenges that teaching and sharing knowledge with a class can bring and understood that individuals can have different needs that, when identified, can bring great results. I believe teaching is fun and that everyone, if given the correct support, can learn and enjoy school.