Good morning everyone!
I have had a lot of questions this week about teaching placement. Unfortunately I don’t have time to respond to people individually, but Lara is asleep now so I will hopefully have enough time to get this post up!
So if you are in the middle of TP, well done. I am sure you are doing a great job. I hope you can carve out some time for yourself this weekend, try not to spend all your free time planning or you will burn out.
Here are some tips I thought may be useful.
- Try integrate and link all your lessons if possible. Inspectors usually stay for two lessons so it is important that they link and fall under the same theme.
- Pick themes with lots of resources , videos etc available on line.
- Ask lower and higher order questioning throughout the lesson.
- Always try draw attention to your behaviour management scheme during the lesson, e.g. giving a child a dojo point for good behaviour.
- Draw attention to any posters or resources you have on the wall during the lesson so the inspector knows it is your display.
- Don’t be afraid to correct a child in front of your inspector. I know for some reason student teachers think they shouldn’t do this but I don’t know why, it is an opportunity to show how your behaviour management skills, and it looks worse to ignore misbehaviour.
- Keep the lesson moving. Don’t give the children too long to write, because you are not showing your teaching skills then! For tp I would recommend ten minutes max of writing for the older classes and less for younger. Remember the inspector needs to see a strong introduction to the lesson, you teaching the lesson, and then a strong closure to the lesson.
- I would recommend using the teacher resource books as a guide definitely, they are great for helping you know how to pitch the lesson but I wouldn’t take the lesson from a resource book word for word. Try be creative!