Over the past two week I have been on placement in a primary school. It was a very challenging yet extremely rewarding experience and I feel like I progressed greatly in the short time.
Something I think I did well over the course of the fortnight and I would consider a strength would be how well I was able to adjust my register. Being aware of who you are speaking to is vital when needing to change your tone and language. When speaking to Primary 2’s you wouldn’t use the same formal language you would speak to the head teacher with or the tone you would speak to the Primary 7’s with. Adjusting your register is very important as you would seem condescending speaking to another teacher in the tone and pitch you speak to the youngest children in. This is something i think I managed to do well over the time in school.
The area I think I made the most progress with over my time spent in the school would be my confidence with taking groups of children and leading activities. In the beginning I found this quite difficult as I was unsure how to approach it but as the weeks went on I became much more confident with this sort of task and enjoyed taking the groups out.
An area I think I still need to work on is ensuring I always show open body language. Often I found myself crossing my arms or holding my fists which displays closed body language. This is something that I definitely need to work on as it is something I will be marked down on in the future.
I worked with Tayler to discuss and compare our feedback checklists. We both agreed with that his strengths were that he spoke very clearly and and at a suitable volume for the classroom setting. In addition, we both agreed that he maintained good eye contact with his pupils throughout. An area of development for the teacher would be to help expand his pupils answers and responses to help support their learning. There were no surprises when comparing my checklist with Tayler as we had very similar results.
I found these tasks fairly easy due to being given the feedback checklist. It made it really clear how to answer and helped me notice positive and negatives things in the way he presents and teaches.
Feedback can be a very positive experience if the person giving it is being critical to help you improve. Without the intentions to help you better yourself then it is just judgement which doesn’t help anyone thrive.
If there was only one thing I could take from these tasks it would be that there are good ways and bad ways to give feedback. Feedback is a great tool if given in a way that helps expand learning and not just put you down about what you’ve done wrong. I will take this with me on placement in future years and onto the career when giving feedback to pupils, whether that be homework or class talks.
I am excited for placement but also very nervous. It will be a great experience and can’t wait to see all the theory we have been learning in practice.
Group and Leadership
My group didn’t appoint a team leader and no leader naturally emerged either. This was due to us all finding our own roles within the team and all being responsible for something. We found our roles naturally and no one delegated these to us. I think everyone was happy with the way our group worked and we didn’t think we were at a disadvantage due to the lack of a team leader. The most challenging thing for me was not knowing everyone’s name. This made it difficult to communicate as i struggled to get the right person’s attention without me knowing their name.
Explaining
I think the group explaining to us did a good job at explaining how they made their den but not why they made it like they did. This could have been to a lack of time to prepare a presentation as they were still making finishing touches until the time was up. The presenter spoke clearly but didn’t seem very confident or sure of what she was saying. Again, I think this was due to lack of preparation and this was one of the 5 P’s that I think was missed out. Another one of the 5 P’s that was missed would be postmortem. This is due to finishing the task set and not really thinking about how it went or what could’ve gone better.
Environment
The wind and noises of nature meant we had to project our voices and speak louder than we would need to in a classroom setting without losing clarity. It was quite difficult and sometimes it was necessary to repeat myself or ask someone to say something again. I was also more gestural and using more forms of non-verbal communication to help further get my point understood. When listening, the environment did tend to distract me as there was always something going on. To overcome this you would need to find a spot that wasn’t very stimulating or had a lot going on behind it to avoid total distraction. I don’t think it is possible to completely stay focused in an environment like that for the entire time.
Negotiation
Our negotiation task was to get a bit of equipment that seemed necessary and important to another group. We failed in our negotiation as we didn’t have anything worth while to offer s we had used all our best equipment to build our own den so nobody found it a beneficial swap. The most challenging part of that was trying to decide how to tackle the negotiation and what strategy to use. We decided on a humorous approach but this was unsuccessful.
This is a new blog where i will be writing about my experiences on placement along with blogging my time studying education at UWS.
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