Following my two week placement within a primary school in North Ayrshire.  I am reflecting on my time spent within these two weeks and how I can develop my communications skills further.  My reflection will be focusing on my strengths when working with the children and also my areas for development especially within communication.  I was mainly placed within the one class throughout my placement, but I feel this gave me the chance to develop relationships with the children and be able to understand their learning abilities and also their learning needs.  The placement has given me an insight into the challenges a teacher faces when trying to plan lessons that suit all children’s needs and how they deal with all different types of behaviours.

Strengths

Having reflected on my time on placement and reviewed my feedback from my peer and mentor, a strength I have is a good mannerism when dealing with the children. Both my peer and mentor commented that I would get down the children’s level and ensure I was engaging with the children I was working with and ensuring they were all included in the tasks they where carrying out at that time. They also stated that I had good communication skills with the children when I was working with them, for instance, I would always keep eye contact and have positive body language when working with the children.

Area of most progress

The first day in class was a real eye opener for me, in terms of behaviour management. The class I was mainly based in had a lot of behaviour issues that I have never came across before. Although the class teacher had a very good control over the behaviour within the class, I found it hard at first to adjust my language and tone when talking to the children who were misbehaving. Very quickly though I found strategies, through observing the teacher and seeing how the children reacted to their wrong doings in how to deal with their behaviour and what language worked when making them realise they could do certain things. So, much so that the teacher actually commented on my feedback that I was not afraid to take a lead role in behaviour management.

Area requiring progress

An area I feel that requires more progress is my verbal communication skills. I know I conduct myself in a professional manner, but I am always trying to ensure I speak with the same professionalism. I feel sometimes the pace of my speech can be very fast and hard to understand and I find myself repeating a lot of what I have just said. So, I have to ensure I am slowing down when I am talking especially to younger children to ensure I am fully understood.

Action plan

I feel my next steps should be to develop my knowledge of more behaviour management strategies. This will help me feel more comfortable when being in classrooms and facing challenging behaviour as I hopefully have more knowledge on how to deal with behaviour more appropriately and so it can help benefit the children.