I believe that my main experience to date has been 1PP1. This was my first placement as a student teacher. I worked with a primary 4 class and taught a variety of lessons on various topics, such as: road safety, football skills, the writing of formal letters, and multiplication in maths. I spent a lot of time on this placement, as I had to research the area, the school, and the children I was working with to be able to work sensitively with the children, something I have come to believe is really important in education. I think that to be sensitive in the way that we work with children and parents is one of the best qualities a teacher can have, I think that it can make them feel at ease and comfortable speaking to us, and therefore more effective work can be done – be that educational, pastoral or something completely different.

Another important element of this placement was the lesson planning. I found that it was a huge amount of work to produce just one lesson. Each required me to begin by considering what I wanted to teach, then how I was going to teach it, how long it would take and what I would need to complete the lesson. After this, however, it was essential to consider my most recent lesson, how it went – what worked and what did not, and more importantly why this was and how I would do it differently. At this point I believe that I learned to reflect. It was something I had been told about during a lecture, but it is a skill I had to really build up in practice, as it was necessary to be able to teach well, and as I realised on this first placement – the children deserved me to deliver the best possible lessons. Being able to reflect can be difficult, as it requires a high level of self-criticality, which can be difficult to do in the beginning. For me, it’s in my nature to only focus on the positive elements what I do, and I really learned that I had to go further. Of course we should feel good about our successes and remember them to recreate them, but I now know that I have to look past this and try to pinpoint where things have gone wrong, or even just where things are not as good as I hope they will be, and try to change this the next time around, all the while trying not to be too negative about oneself.

While, 1PP1 has been the most significant experience to date, I have a few others. Before I left school, I was a Rainbow Leader with Girlguiding and worked with girls aged 5-7 to create, organise and then run crafts, games and other activities for the girls to enjoy. On reflection, I think I built up a huge amount of personal confidence at this time. I learned that I could stand up in public, and work with the girls and really did not need to be conscious of people looking at me, and more concerned about what I was doing. I believe that this has been beneficial throughout the past few years, as it began to make me more confident in more areas of my life, so by 1PP1, I did not struggle as many people would have at the prospect of starting to teach, because I had had to put myself out there before and was able to do so again to begin teaching.

I was also a peer mentor while I was at school. For this, we were paired up with a child of primary school age who was considered vulnerable in some way, who we would then work with, there were five pairs in a group and we did a mixture of one on one activities and ones with the whole group. On reflection, the biggest learning experience for me was simply how incredibly lucky I was throughout my own childhood. Some of the stories I would hear about where some of them came from were truly saddening to know, often making me think back on myself at their age – I went to a large Edinburgh independent school and had grown up with the benefit of private tuition where I needed it and was involved in many extra-curricular activities. I think that this links back to sensitivity. For me at this point, I learned not to assume anything, not to take anything at face value and that it was really important to have a strong ability to consider different people and their points of view. I believe that I developed a more empathetic personality, which I think that I still maintain, and will always be useful to me as a teacher.