On Wednesday my mentor observed me with my Year 9 class. I had taken on board her advice from the previous week and spent ages trying to include everything she had said.
My lesson was a debate on who was to blame for climate change. What I had sttruggled with the week before was varying my activities and not doing enough differentiation, so this was the real focus.
I started the class of with a simple question which required them to think back on previous lessons and which managed to link into the theme of today's lesson. I then asked them to list everything they knew about climate change into man made and natural columns. After that I provided different students with differing articles regarding climate change. Some were Science based, some factual, some newspaper stories, some BBC bitesize revision material. Each student had been given something to read based upon their predicted grades and current attainment. After this I grouped differing ability students into groups of whom had all read differing articles on who was to blame for Global warming.
The student's did mostly appear to enjoy this type of activity. However, my initial worries were that behaviour wasn't of the normal high standard I expect. I hadn't reaffirmed my expectations of them, this I realised is key, particularly when introducing a new style of learning. This exact point was reflected back in my feedback. I though the lesson went pretty badly because of this aspect but my mentor said it was a massive improvement on the previous week.
I taught this exact same lesson to another year 9 group I teach the following day. This time I made sure to tell them what I expected of them and I broke down the time I gave them into smaller chuncks of which I questioned them and made suggestions. Any inappropriate behaviour was dealt with in a quick, firm manner. I gave warnings out much quicker than I normally would and the students picked up on this quite quickly, behaviour in contrast was much better and work clearly more focused and on task...If only I'd been observed in this lesson!
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