During semester 1 an important aspect of my professional development stemmed from the working together module. At school I always liked to do individual, written tasks instead of group, practical tasks. The reason for this was not because I did not like working with others or because I was not good at it; it was because I believed that I learned more sitting and doing a reading or written task on my own. I liked the ‘boring’ way of learning as it is often put at school but that is what worked for me.

Considering this, the working together module filled me with a slight anxiety that I do not like to admit. However; I enjoyed working as an active member of my group during this module and my feedback from my peers was all positive in all aspects of being an active participant.  I do believe that the presentation we had to create would have been quicker to do by yourself as meeting 10 other people with different schedules was exceedingly difficult. This I realised was not the point of the task. While the task was exploring the theory behind professions working together, the whole presentation was to give you a sense of what it is like to work with other individuals in a professional context.

When you take it out of the university setting and apply it to our professions in practice, the importance of communicating with social workers and community learning development workers is essential for young people’s well-being. The reason for this is because there are things that as a teacher we are not aware of and this may be impacting on a child in a school setting. To gather the information we need to support a young person we need to be able to communicate effectively with the other professions who are involved in that child’s lives. I realise that this is not something that you can do alone because as teachers we do not know most of what will be happening outside of school.

Reflecting on this, there are many aspects of my career where it will be better for me and my pupils’ for me to have worked with other colleagues or professionals. Bringing it into the context of just working with colleagues in the same school; planning can be done collaboratively. For example, if you are teaching in a big school with several teachers per year stage, it is often more beneficial to plan together as it is several ideas and opinions not just one and all children in that year group will be experiencing the same learning opportunities. It also may allow teachers to play to their strengths as you may be a specialist in music and the other class teacher PE, so you can work it so you take their class for your specialism and they take your class for theirs. This is just one example but there are many. If your class has a teaching assistance, it is extremely important to work effectively with them. This should be in terms of involving them in planning and also communicating effectively so that they are clear about what they have to do as well as having an open communication system where they feedback about pupils.

Considering all of this I recognise that my preference to work on my own was okay when I was at school and that while I participated in working with others I always knew I preferred individual task. This however, is different in a professional context. My view on working with others has changed as I would rather now work with others as that is how I am going to develop as a professional. By working alongside my peers to discuss what we are learning about as well as working closely with placement mentors and other professionals. I will learn from others and that is what I believe will assist me in my professional development.