The materials on these pages are the patchwork assessments and their associated appendices provided as evidence for the PGCAPHE course.

My personal philosophy of teaching…I want to make a difference!

This might be making a difference to a young person’s understanding of a school subject or making a young person believe in their ability to do something better but ultimately I want to make a difference.

I prefer to think about ‘learning and teaching’ rather than ‘teaching and learning’. This may seem a little pedantic, however, I always start with the learning…what are the learners going to be learning or what do they need and want to learn? There has to be a reason for learning, a purpose, or else what is the point? This does not mean that learning has to be practical and useful all of the time, and what one person learns will not be the same as someone else, but it must be meaningful to that individual. Therefore it is no coincidence that the principles of curriculum design in Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) (Scottish Government, 2009) include relevance, challenge and enjoyment and personalisation and choice. Learning must be relevant to the lives that children, young people and adults are living now and will be living in the future and help them to get the best out of themselves (V1, K1, K2, K3)

Only once the learning has been identified do I think about how I am going to teach. How I teach depends on my audience, on what I am teaching and the purpose of that teaching. There are times when you have to lecture to transfer knowledge. There are times when it is important for the learners to investigate and learn through their own experience. There are times where it is vital that learners learn together and other times for them to work on their own. Consequently, in my teaching I use a variety of teaching strategies, organisational strategies and modes of delivery (A1, A2, A4).

I believe that a CPD session is a successful one if I can take one thing away from that session and implement it immediately in my practice the next day. This does not need to be a strategy or a worksheet but it could be a thought that provokes me to reconsider a way of thinking or being. When I am planning and preparing teaching inputs I consider how useful the learning will be, and how I would use it, in order to understand the potential impact it will have for my learners (A4, A5).

My justification for teaching using different strategies and varying how I teach different groups is that ultimately it is my responsibility to enthuse, motivate and teach my learners by adjusting how I work accordingly (V2).

I want to give my learners the best possible start on their learning journey and to encourage them to become self-motivated seekers of how to make things different and better.

Lecture observation – February 2016

Now that took me back…having someone sitting in my ‘class’ watching me teach. That hasn’t happened for a good few years (accepting when I was observed working with the PGDE(S) maths students just before Christmas). This was different though being observed by someone who does not know me on a personal or professional level (I’ll come back to this later).

I spent an inordinate amount of time preparing for the input making sure that the lecture flowed, made sense, did what I wanted it to do plus incorporated the use of resources to keep the students motivated and engaged. They probably didn’t know what had hit them!

Comfortingly though as soon as the students walked into the lecture theatre they made lots of ‘ooow’ noises when asked to take multiple choice cards plus a whiteboard and pen – know thy audience – they’ve always reacted well to the whiteboards in particular and today was no exception – a good start.

The initial YouTube clip seemed to have the desired effect and there was a buzz around the room when the majority of the group ended up on the smiley face. Perhaps on reflection though it may have been an ideal opportunity to delve into some of the mathematics behind the clip rather than taking a superficial look at the activity being related to probability – something to consider for next year; alternatively maybe come back to it at the end once the students have had an opportunity to consider the progression/skills of chance and uncertainty and be able to appreciate how to use it as a stimulus. I’ve already retitled the slide ‘Chance or Certainty?’ which I think adds another dimension to what the clips represent. So doubly good start!

Admission time…I totally forgot to print off the multiple choice card slide, which I had wanted to display on the visualiser so that I didn’t have to keep reminding the students what each letter represented – note to self, go back to putting a resources slide on the PowerPoint to keep track of things I need!

The next few slides with their activities and interactive and discursive opportunities worked well but the main strategy which helped enormously at this point in the input was that I have started to learn more of the students’ names providing me with the opportunity to engage more specifically with them. I tried not to use this in a threatening way but boy did it make everyone sit up a little more! As I see the MA2 students for a significant number of inputs this is going to be a priority for me for next year and in fact I am already making in-roads to learning the names of the MA1s. This hadn’t actually been a priority for Semester 1 as with teaching the 180 PGDE(P) students there was no way I could remember everyone’s name. Also I hadn’t needed to learn names up until this semester as I hadn’t really taught an entire cohort of students in a lecture situation and was able to use my table names and number cards to ensure participation in the workshops. Working in a lecture theatre environment has been a steep learning curve as it is so unlike a classroom teaching environment. Saying this it has really spurred me on to think about and investigate ways to ‘make’ people interact with me although this is still a work in progress.

So, returning to why today was different from my observation before Christmas. It was potentially because there were more students today and I have not built up as close a relationship with them as I have with my PGDE(S) mathematicians and therefore am not as relaxed working with them? As hinted at earlier perhaps it is the difference in my relationship with the two observers. I was more nervous today and perhaps need to reflect a little bit more about why that was. However, it is amazing how once you get started your instincts and experience kick in and eventually you forget that there is someone there, watching.

The one thing that I have really loved about coming to the University is that I’m again experiencing that buzz you get from planning interesting activities and seeing them work (or not!) and taking chances and trying things out. Although my job as a senior leader in a school was rewarding and challenging I came into teaching to teach and that’s what I’m doing again and I love it!

Every day is a learning day, folks! Every day!