For the past two weeks I completed my first ever placement in a primary school. I was situated in Primary 7 for one week and then Primary 1 the next so it was a great opportunity to see opposites ends of the school and how differently they all learn. While being on placement it gave a chance to reflect on my own strengths within the classroom and how I plan to develop as a student teacher.

Strengths 

During my time on placement I gained many new skills. One that I am going to focus on in positive facial expressions. When working alongside the pupils or members of staff I was told that my positive attitude and facial expressions created a warm and welcoming personality. I knew that this was a strength as I could see that pupils felt at ease with me as they were beginning to come up to me and ask for help if they needed it.

Area For Development 

I have realised that pace is a skill which I need to develop more. I need to be able to adapt my pace depending on the age of the pupils I am working with. I knew that this was a current area for development as during placement especially in the infant end of the school pupils were sometimes asking me to repeat things that I had said to them.

Action Plan 

I will continue to be positive within the classroom environment as this will reinforce the pupils that I am keen to learn and that I am fully engaged in their learning. For my pace to develop I will read things aloud to make sure that my pace is at the correct speed rather than rushing and speaking too quickly.

Hey guys!!!

Just wanted to make a quick post to announce that I have recently started an Instagram blog as well to log my journey on this course

If your’re bored and looking for some inspiration come and visit my page @learning_teacher18

🙂

Group and Leadership

• Throughout the task I wouldn’t say someone stood up as a leader during the tasks however there were a lot of people who knew what they were doing and were just happy enough to vocalize their ideas.
• Many people within the group advised various possible plans in which the group could maybe use and then suggested what the rest of the group should do to kind of put the plan into action
• I do believe that a few members of the group just didn’t want to put any ideas across because they might have been to shy to share them, however no one was really left out within the group as everyone took their equal part within the task in order to complete it.
• I personally believe I could have communicated more within the group because sometimes I felt like I was just standing there with nothing really to do once we had completed what we had been tasked to do.

Explaining

• Our communication as a group was excellent, everyone who had an idea expressed it clearly and we made sure that everyone’s points of view were being heard.
• The task was explained very clearly at the beginning of the overall task. Someone took the set of instructions given in order to make our den and if any one wasn’t sure of something they then questioned the individual on what was meant.
• Preparation is definitely one of the 5 P’s our team missed out. Our team jumped straight to trying to build the tent rather than coming up with a successful idea first. However, we did stop after a while and someone came up with a new strategy of how to build our tent.

Environment

• With the weather, when working with our team our communication had to be louder as the wind was picking up making it harder to hear and listen to instructions or ideas.
• When in a classroom I wont need to create a louder volume when the children can’t hear me as if I do then that will be classed as shouting!
• The noise of the environment didn’t distract me as an individual, however if a teacher is struggling to keep pupils attention in outdoor environments, try and move to a better location where there is less noise.

Negotiation

• Our negotiations were successful to a certain extent. We spoke to another group and told them that their cardboard was essential for our den however our group didn’t even need it! Although we did end up using it as a roof in the end so it was put to good use 🙂
• The most challenging parts of this task was to get other teams to give up their materials they weren’t using. Lets just say a few were more stubborn than others!

It has been a very quick 3 weeks. Life at University is completely different from what I expected it to be!

I have enjoyed every minute of my experience so far, it has allowed my to be more confident in myself as an individual. Angela’s first workshop with us  “getting to know you” was a great experience and was really helpful in the sense that it allowed ourselves to get to know the rest of the people on the same course as us. So now I know more than just faces, now I can put names to those faces!

I’m looking forward to beginning my journey here at the University of the West of Scotland!

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