Teaching Appraisal Ten
- Nicole Watts
- Jul 5, 2017
- 2 min read
This morning Kerry Morgan came to observe me teach one of my Year 11 classes - 11MATA. This class is an advanced class who sit a combination of internal and external assessments and have a heavy focus on algebra throughout the year. This lesson was a bit of a messy lesson in the sense that most of the class were completing guided, but independent revision on the algebra we had covered over the term. I then also had a couple of students working on an extension internal and one student working on an independent learning programme (ILP). For this lesson I had organised 2-3 differentiated worksheets for the 6 skills we had covered. In addition, I wrote some textbook exercises on the board to supplement these. I find these useful as there is also notes and examples before each exercise to help prompt the students. I feel like this worked really well for the couple of days that I structured lessons like this as it enabled students to focus on concepts that felt weaker in and was also a nice break from "new learning". Having learnt algebra for 8 weeks straight and with another 2 terms of it to go I felt it was a good time to slow down the pace. This also gave me an opportunity to work more 1:1 with my students doing the extension internal work (to make sure they had self-learnt everything required for the assessment) and to also catch up with my student working on an ILP.
I feel like I have developed some really great relationships in this class, and it was great to see that an external observer witnessed this as well. I have worked hard with this class particularly to do so. Being an advanced class it is important to me that the students can chill out and have a laugh every so often. I have developed some good routines in the class and have worked hard on maintaining these while also giving the students an element of freedom - i.e. if they're late to class they know it is their own consequence that they have missed learning and I won't "tell them off" for it as long as they arrive respectfully and catch up in their own time.
One thing I feel I need to work on with this class is integrating more warm up activities. It is often overwhelming how much learning we need to get done so I have begun defaulting into getting stuck into the work. This term I am going to try out a new lesson structure where the students write their notes at the end of the lesson ready for the next day. We can then start the lesson with a quick warm up, go over worked examples of the new content (written up the day before), and then practice. I have found writing notes at the beginning of the lesson often draws out the task, whereas, knowing the bell is going in x number of minutes will create a sense of urgency - and if they don't get the task completed it can be done in their own time with no impact on their practice time!
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