New teacher's diary - December 2007
Steve Rivers (PGDE: Primary student)
Week four of the infant placement has just started and it’s building up to my tutor visit at the end of this week, which is slightly nerve wracking. The expectation is that we can teach the whole class for a whole day by the end of the five weeks and I’m well on course for this. The workload is much greater than nursery school as teaching plans have to be written for every lesson that we take and the evaluation and planning post-lesson takes up just as much time. This also has to be combined with research into teaching techniques and ideas, child development and observations for a maths presentation in January. Needless to say, this all goes beyond the normal school working day.
I have a class of 29 Primary 2s (6-year olds) and it has taken some time to gain a good understanding of the abilities of this age group and also the individual strengths of the pupils. The range of ability in the class is quite striking and this adds much more challenge to the lessons I have planned. There is quite a bit of leeway in the lessons we can plan however it has to roughly fit into the curriculum stage of the class we are in. Maths and language are very much emphasised but we have to cover every subject area so coming up with engaging ideas for science, drama and PE lessons has been testing my creative abilities (and my ability to foresee problems)! My favourite aspect so far has been designing a sequence of lessons based upon Roald Dahl’s The Twits to encourage engagement in books and development of language use. I think from the children’s point of view, they just love the revolting tricks and humour in the story!
The best part of the past few weeks has been actually teaching a class, getting to know the children and learning at a rapid pace what works and what doesn’t. Much of this comes from the experience of the class teacher who is supervising me and she has been really supportive and open to my ideas. My least favourite part of the placement has been the sheer amount of work involved in meeting the required standard of evidence and evaluation, however necessary this may be. One thing I can say is that there is plenty of fun involved in much of the direct teaching and seeing the children produce work that I had hoped they would, sometimes exceeding what I had hoped, is a great motivator for the work I’m doing.