Developing and Evaluating Your Teaching – Assessment Patch

I have 24 years’ experience teaching in both the primary and secondary sectors and have now been through my first academic year as a lecturer.
During this year I have utilised many of the strategies I employed when teaching young people but have also expanded my repertoire in order to model a variety of good practices and also in how I use technology to enhance the learning experience. Ashwin (2015) describes the need for teachers to support learners in their learning; to recognise learners’ prior learning; and to engage learners in developing their knowledge and skills through using the practices associated with their subject. I am very conscious of the fact that my students come to lectures about how to teach mathematics with a variety of experiences, both positive and negative, and that I have to recognise and build on their prior knowledge to move their thinking forward by providing appropriate challenge (A2). Therefore building trust is imperative in order to identify and understand the learning needs of the students and armed with this information to plan meaningful, relevant learning experiences that meet these needs. With large groups of students, meeting everyone’s learning needs can be difficult; however, by creating an ethos of genuine, honest, open professional dialogue I feel I have mitigated this to some degree (A4). I have utilised ways of engaging all of the students both in lectures and workshops, for example, using multiple choice cards and table identifiers and numbers, and explicitly refer to these resources by way of modelling approaches that the students can use in their own practice (K2).

What do I need to change/improve?

Reflecting on my tutor’s observation of my teaching and the feedback I received from my students (see Lesson observation, Appendix 2 and Appendix 4), I feel that the following three things are my next steps for this coming academic year:

• Encourage students to think beyond what they need to do to pass their assignment – see Appendix 1, paragraph 1. It is my professional responsibility to prepare my students to be reflective practitioners and I need to build in more explicit opportunities to make this a part of what we do rather than an add-on (A1, A2).
• As face-to-face student contact time is being increasingly squeezed, I need to employ more efficient ways of working. In particular, flipping the learning and using technology to support this way of delivering content, as discussed in The Flexible Learner – Appendix 4, deserves further investigation and serious consideration (K4, V3).
• Continue to plan for and integrate a variety of learning and teaching strategies into my inputs in order to model good practice, i.e. ‘walk the talk’.

We need to think about the role and purpose of different types of teaching and learning strategies and think about where and when it is best to employ different strategies to best impact on students’ understanding and that this is not just about understanding the content (V1). It is also important to model ways of working in order that students understand the expectations associated with them and their role in participating appropriately.