Reflection on the past week

Another week has gone past, yet again always busy and never enough time!

Monday was quite a productive day. My mentor and myself now team teach the year 7 and 8's after lunch. We decided this week that I would yake the year 8's and she'd informally observe me and vice versa with the Year 7's.

My year 8 lesson was on the Burgess model and getting the students to understand what is located in each zone and in turn understand how settlements are laid out. I decided to do more of a hands on lesson which the students appeared to enjoy, however we got no way near as much covered as I would have liked! Getting the timing right on these sorts of activities always proves to be difficult. Any way based on my plenary it appeared most of the students had covered the learning objectives I had set them. The plenary was actually really fun: the students were shown some images around Slough then had to identify which zone they were in (either: A, B, C or D.) To do this they had to either stand up with their hand's above their heads (A), stand up (B), remain seated (C) or get under the desk (D). This proved quite amusing and the majority had it right each time and didn't just hide under the desk.

After that I watched my mentor teach the Year 7's. The lesson was a good place and she introduced me to a variety of AFL techniques that I can implement throughout the lesson. The techniques she used were the stand up/sit down approach followed by questioning which was fast paced but identified to her who had or hadn't understood and then she tailored her questions to the students response accordingly.

This is definitely something I intend to implement next week.