Effective Communicators

What we have been doing all this term all in one place!

Effective Communicator Week 5

This week we decided to have a maths flair to communicate.

Thankfully I do these types of maths problems a lot so my class loved solving this challenge.

Graduate Student

Tomorrow I have my first Graduate student!

This is her first time in a classroom and I am slightly nervous. The Graduate degree is slightly different to the Post Graduate Primary degree that Universities run. This is more classroom based and you can take less than a year or more than a year to complete it depending on how quickly you meet all the requirements. As this is my first time having someone no doubt I will blog about the differences and similarities I had when doing mine.

I am not 100% sure how a post graduate degree is run these days. I did mine in 1999! At that time they only let fifty people apply for a place on the programme ( not sure if this is still the same). I applied for this only because I wanted to carry on with becoming an Educational Psychologist and was told that I should have a teaching degree as this would help me. So I sent in my application, passed that, then passed the interview section.

There had been over 200 applicants and my cohort of fifty adults had only five of us who had just finished our university degree. The rest had been in fulltime employment and had wanted a change in career.

I'm not sure what to expect tomorrow. I am quite lucky as I work alongside some who has just finished this programme so I can ask her lots of questions.

My biggest challenge will be to plan on paper. I tend to bounce form one idea to another, change my planning halfway through and post it note a lot of my ideas.

Tomorrow is going to be an interesting day.

Working with a beginning teacher (BT)

So far this year I have worked with three different teachers and three completely different styles of teaching and planning. This has got me thinking about they way I teach and plan. This term I am working with a BT (beginning teacher) and I have already realised that my way of planning lessons doesn't gel with there's.

This is one problem you have when planning and teaching in a team. I have had to adapt my way of planning to suit someone else. Now, I can hear some of you asking 'why doesn't the other person change theirs?' and to be honest fair comment but as an experienced teacher and them a BT is that fair? I have the experience to adapt and change where most BT find this quite hard to do.

I don't plan long detailed planning these days. Back in the UK we were always expected to have detailed planning of every single lesson and even then I found that hard as I had a tendency to chop and change everything. These days I don't plan in so much detail and I tend to plan the first two days and then from that gauge how the rest of the week will transpire. My planning is fill of scribbles annotated notes or post its. I am quite happy to go off on a tangent if it means meeting my students needs.

I am someone who can pretty much think up an idea on the way to work and run with it. I chop and change my planning, ideas and pretty much my day sometimes.

This isn't for everyone.

I began to realise this in the first week with my new colleague. While I was explaining my ideas about blocking out the whole morning for reading and writing I could sense she wanted actual times. I had envisage we would mix it up a bit. Set whole class teaching of the writing, let some go off, small groups teaching, a bit of reading, back to writing etc. What they wanted was a lot more structure and a block for reading and writing.

I am learning (slowly) that sometimes you have to let go your ideas and slip into others even if it is not want you want. There will be time for me to help develop my new colleague into being a little more flexible but for now my role is to be supportive and help them become a great teacher.