We were supposed to complete S3 Learning Conversations today – that didn’t happen.
Issues arising are:
- the bulletin takes too long. From next week the Coaching teacher is just going to extract student 1 at the beginning of class. They can read a print out of the bulletin when they get back in.
- Difficult to keep to 10 mins. We need a way of measuring the time, without being intrusive, so that we can stay on schedule.
On the plus side:
- Conversations took a bit longer because they were going well. Maybe the first sessions were always going to be like this, until we find our feet.
- All pupils came with things to do in the study session. They worked in silence. Simon spent some time with students who were absent last week, catching them up on the process. After that, he was free to add a few notes to his CPD journal in relative peace.
Also, Mia suggested to the kids that they keep a reflective journal each week to focus them on their goals and ways forward. If it works with older students, why not with kids? She showed them an example from her own reflective journal. It might be worth exploring this option further after the Oct holiday after more pupils have had a coaching session.
Mia was on Learning Conversations today: ‘I thought it went quite well. In fact, I was really impressed with the way the students responded to the process; they seemed to really engage and explore ‘real’ issues that affect their learning. However, I found it HUGELY difficult not to give advice. I mean, really difficult. I need to work on the open ended questions for Options and Ways Forward so that I’m not mentoring rather than coaching.
These learning conversations will often involve talking about personal circumstances – we saw that in our own training sessions. It makes the trust aspect all the more prominent, for me. The kids need to be able to confide in you, essentially, about how or why they face barriers to learning. As coaches, we need to respect that, absolutely.
I decided that a jotter was where I was going to keep my notes as it’s easily portable and keeps everything together. I just allocated a couple of pages per child. My entries from this week were just bullet points, dated and with dates entered for the times the pupils were to action their Ways Forward’. It took less than 5 minutes to do a couple of entries at the end of the lesson. As a system, it may evolve over the year. I didn’t make notes in the session.’
