Collaborating – leading and learning collaboratively in classrooms, establishments and communities.
7/10-I feel like in my practice I collaborate a lot with other teachers in my own faculty and other departments. In my own department we are always sharing resources & ideas. We discuss about how our lessons went and various L & T strategies for pupils. I also collaborate with colleagues from the other departments and local community for whole school projects as John Muir, DofE and Eco school. For STEM and IDL I as a part of team liaise with maths and PE mainly.
Self evaluation – leadership of self-evaluation for improvement
7/10- I am a self-reflective practitioner and I am quite good at evaluating myself against self-evaluation tools by looking into what did not go well and how it can be better next time. As I am working with very experienced staff in my faculty, I often discuss various ways and strategies which can result in effective classroom teaching and learning and how I can develop this into my practice. I am now in a position where I am getting better but still a long way to go at evaluating. As a part of whole self-evaluation process we all teachers take part in TRIO observation where 3 teachers from different departments observe each other’s lesson and share collective feedback on the lesson. We all science teacher have open door policy and can walk in any class to observe a lesson.
learning – leadership at all levels of high quality learning and teaching
6/10- Lifelong learning is at the heart of our job. I am always trying out different teaching and learning techniques to improve engagement and mot in motivation in the classroom. This has resulted in raising attainment and achievement. Sometimes the challenge is finding time to plan those consistently high quality lessons especially when we all jiggling with so much paperwork, course updates and new initiatives etc.
It sounds like there is strong and supportive teamwork in your school, Rachna. Do you find the balance could be improved between leading changes to courses following updates, and leading pedagogy by focusing on high quality lessons? If so, how could you improve the balance?
Race between course changes and SQA updates, whole school initiatives and the course completion deadlines is never ending. Teachers are at times under pressure and time spent on quality lessons is not enough. I can improve this balance if I am given more time say a week– to plan I still can deliver high quality lessons.