Contents:

  Slide 3: Where I began

  Slide 4: Behaviour Management

  Slide 7: Pedagogy

Slide 10: Curriculum

Slide 13: Assessment

Slide 16: Professional Behaviours

Where I began

In September I was most nervous about teaching A-Level as can be seen above, I didn't feel like I knew enough about the topic to be able to teach it well. 

Behaviour Management

When hearing how to manage behaviour at the beginning of the year it sounded easy, but as soon as I got into the classroom it was apparent that to manage behaviour takes a lot more adaptability than I initially thought.

In my first placement I was given a target in my mentor meeting to "Manage student behaviour with year 9 (entry and exit behaviours) and year 12 (keeping them on task) for a double lesson". So in the following weeks, I focused on the entry and exit routine of the year 9's as well as other classes ensuring to give them instructions to complete while I take the register. I then also allowed a few minutes at the end of each lesson for students to save their work, log out and get ready to go to their next lesson.

​Image taken from mentor meeting on 11/11/2021 

Behaviour Management

My behaviour management had improved since that previous comment as in the next week the focus around behaviour management had been removed from all my classes except two which had been more troublesome classes and so needed me to use my proximity to keep students on task throughout the lesson.

The comment around 10B was because the class was a quiet class and so I needed to engage them and get some discussions going. To do this I made my topics more engaging, acting out certain movements when talking about networks and then after a lesson or two of this the class starting opening up and I found that they were becoming more responsive to my questioning.

​Image taken from mentor meeting on 18/11/2021 

Behaviour Management

In my second placement, I have had to use a few other behaviour management tactics as it is a grammar school and so they are generally well behaved and have a passion for learning. I have, however, had a couple of situations in which there were students disrupting themselves by talking to the person next to them rather than doing their work, so to handle this I went over to them and politely asked them what they were doing. As soon as I asked this they jumped back into work mode and said that they were having a quick conversation. I gave them a word of warning to ensure it doesn't happen again and this had been picked up by my mentor as shown in the screenshot below that was taken from the lesson observation.

​Image taken from lesson observation on the 24/03/2022 

Pedagogy

One of the biggest parts of pedagogy in my opinion is to differentiate tasks so that students can work efficiently without feeling put down by being unable to complete the tasks set out in front of them. So, in most of my resources I tried to scaffold information so students have a base that they can refer back to, I made sure that any PowerPoints I created were uploaded to Google Classroom. That way students can access the slides at any point in the lesson or after to go back over information

​Image taken from Google Classroom.  

​I have also ensured that tasks I create are differentiated to allow students to eventually work independently as shown on the next slide. In the given example on Slide 8, I was teaching Year 10 students how to manipulate strings within their code and I found that there were some students who were struggling to put it into practise. I used the tasks to start off with taking some letters out of a string and printing them, then moved onto changing the case of these letters and then they had to use what they had learned to create an algorithm for task 3.

Pedagogy

Task 1

Task 2

Task 3

Extension

Pedagogy

At every point I have tried my hardest to address any student misconceptions to ensure nobody is leaving my classroom believing something that isn't true. In some lessons, I worked on misconceptions one-to-one, asking students to tell me what they know and then questioning any mistakes they may have made. In another lesson, I had looked through the work from students and found that the majority had picked up on a similar misconception and so I went over the topic again at the beginning of the lesson giving a visual example to help explain the topic. Then I asked all students to correct their work from the previous lesson.

​Image taken from Lesson Observation on the 05/05/2022 

Curriculum

To create a functioning unit within Year 8, I devised a scheme of work planning out what should be covered in each lesson. I also took into account a competition that the year 8's would be participating in.

In this unit the students would be creating their own videos about a minute long that would make use of a green screen and video editing.

​Image taken from Year 8 Scheme of work  

Curriculum

I have also designed a series of lessons around the use of python to create shapes using Turtle. These lessons were introducing students to a written language as opposed to a block based language, so I made sure the tasks started off simple, with how to move the turtle around the screen, then in the next week showing them how to make their code easier to write with a for loop to repeat certain lines of code.

These images were taken from the instruction sheets given to students. Starting with a base code that we went through as a class (left) and then tasks to edit the code to create new colours and shapes

Curriculum

In a year 12 revision lesson just before their mock examinations, I prepared a lesson to give the students some exam questions and then to go through the mark scheme to make sure students are able to answer the questions properly.

​To do this I gave them 10 minutes to get some questions done, then go through the answers to those questions and then they get more time. This worked well and they seemed to answer the questions without much error.

At the end of this though, there was still some time left of the lesson so I allowed the students to revise the topics they felt weakest at. This provided them all the opportunity to succeed and if they had any questions about their topic then I was there to answer them, meeting their needs without creating an excessive workload.

Image taken from a lesson observation on 25/04/2022

Assessment

In all of my lessons, I try to make sure I am asking questions throughout any teacher talk to make sure students remain engaged in the lesson, but also to check for understanding. If students are unable to answer a question then I will go back over the topic but explain it differently to make sure they are taking in the information. Before moving onto a new section or letting students go onto the worksheets I will always ask them if they have got any questions and answer them if they do.

Assessment

When teaching the year 8's how to code in Python for the first time, I asked them all to upload their code and a screenshot of each task once they have completed it. In doing this, I was able to go through their work after each lesson and I could pick up on misconceptions that students had and I placed comments on their workbooks to let them know where they had gone wrong and a suggestion on how to improve.

Images taken from student work in google classroom

Assessment

Another part of assessment that I have completed this year is the marking of some mock examinations both in year 10 and year 12.

Professional Behaviours

In both placements and in general I always try my hardest to be polite to all members of staff and all students so that they are in the best mood and so are likely to give back good effort in their work. This has proven to be successful as the responses from my mentor and my Professional Coordinating Mentor have been really positive. "His professional conduct is faultless" (PCM, Placement 2)

Screenshot taken from PPR3

Screenshot taken from PPR1

Professional Behaviours

Through the year I have been using the Virtual Learning Environments (VLE's) to answer any questions students have outside of lesson times, including by email too. I have also spoken to parents on parents evening to update them on the progress of their children in class and answer any questions they have.

Professional Behaviours

I have also used some of my lunch times to assist in an extra curricular session, where students were submitting ideas for the young game developers competition. I had also volunteered to join a year 10 trip to the science museum in London but the trip was cancelled on the morning we were meant to go, due to unforeseeable circumstances.

My final piece of evidence is that I have been working alongside my co-workers to create different pieces of code such as a Huffman tree so that we could use this to teach the year 12's about Huffman trees and how they could implement it in code.