Uncategorized – Tayler's Blogs UWS

November 12, 2018

Reflections on Placement

The last two weeks I attended my first school experience placement. This experience for me was thoroughly enjoyable, yet challenging in pushing me out of my “comfort zone”.

One strength I found I developed over the course of the two weeks was getting to know each pupil in my class (P.2/3) individually e.g. I knew every pupil by their name. I could change my register in how I spoke to the class and then how I spoke to the class teacher. When presenting ‘mini’ lessons to the class I ensured every pupil was involved, I used their names to ask questions when carrying out a “show me, tell me” lesson.

I feel I made most progress when taking smaller groups of students for reading and mathematics tasks. I enjoyed doing these tasks as I got see a variety of abilities within the class as a whole.

One development I have realised I need to work on is my teacher voice/presence. The teacher I was working with could get the class under control by using a simple ‘class call back’ e.g. the teacher would shout ‘STOP’ and the class would stop what they were doing and repeat back to her ‘COLLABORATE AND LISTEN’. Although, when I was in control of the class I found it difficult to get the attention of the whole class at once. I have took note of all the ‘class call backs’ my teacher used and hope to make use of them on my next school experience placement.

October 22, 2018October 22, 2018

Situated Communication Feedback Workshop

Independent Task – Feedback

Both Heather and myself had very similar reactions to the videos. We both agreed that two strengths of the teacher were:

The teacher spoke clearly and at an adequate volume insuring all children could clearly hear him.
He ensured he had eye contact with all pupils in the classroom.

One area for development that we both identified was:

The teacher did not often help the pupils expand on their own responses.

I found this particular task quite easy. I think the check-list helped a lot as it gave you specific behaviours to look out for.

Feedback and Judgement.

There is a difference between feedback and judgement. I believe that critical feedback is essential but there is a line between being critical and being judgemental. You must try and portray critical feedback in a way that does not come across as negative judgement.

One thing I will take to placement.

From watching the videos I have realised that verbal communication is just as important as non-verbal communication. It is essential to ensure I am speaking at an adequate volume but also making eye contact and positive body language to engage all pupils as best as I can.

Placement.

I am very eager to start placement but I am somewhat nervous. I am a little worried about the workload and keeping up with formative assignments as well as placement task sheets but hopefully I can manage my time proportionally.

September 25, 2018

Situated Communication Outdoor Workshop

Group and Leadership

I believe that our group worked really well together, there was no direct leader appointed but one of our group members, Rebecca, has previously done tasks like this within her role as a Guide Leader so therefor she had more knowledge than the rest of us and naturally became group leader. Rebecca had a very good impact on helping the group decide the area in which we were going to build and which materials to use. However, Rebecca being ‘group leader’ did not affect any of the other team members, in my opinion, as each person had a different task and it worked really well. Each individual team members opinions were all listened to and incorporated as much as possible in the making of our ‘den’.

Explaining

The group who were explaining to us did a very good job, one girl in particular started the presentation but as she went on more of their group added in information. They explained very well why they designed their den the way they did. It was portrayed very well. I think they successfully completed the 5P’s.

Environment

I found that working outdoors you had to project your voice more and sometimes repeat or ask a team member to repeat what they had said, this was due to the natural sounds outdoors such as the wind and birds chirping. More often than not, a lot of non-verbal communication forms were used. Sometimes the natural outdoors can be distracting as leaves are falling off trees, trees are changing colour and bird flying around – not to mention the local dogs coming over for a visit. Although, I think my group coped well with the distractions and stayed focused on our given task.

Negotiation

Our negotiation task was to swap one of our team members for a member from another team. Our negotiation was unsuccessful. One member of our team made attempts at negotiating but most teams were well underway in their tasks and no one wanted a swap. This is understandable as we felt the same way, we had just got to know everyone better, started our indivdual tasks and we did not want to swap with someone else after having started building our den.

September 17, 2018