I consider myself incredibly lucky to teach the students that attend my school. They are enthusiastic, funny, caring towards each other and have a real thirst for knowledge. And that is it. No "but". No "except on Friday period 5". No "because I only teach top sets".
It is easy to forget this as a teacher when you become bogged down in admin, Parents' Evenings, reports and school politics, but I am making a concious effort to embrace these wonderful qualities and use it to enhance the teaching and learning that goes on within my classroom.
One such lesson happened this week whilst teaching year 7. I will openly admit that this started out as what I call a "door knob lesson". A lesson that springs to mind as you turn the handle and open the door into the room. A suitably fitting word to describe this is "unprepared". I would like to add, however, that this lack of organisation was through no fault of my own. An incident with a student in another lesson, a member of the team being sent home sick and the printer (which is a good 3 minute walk away) refusing to recognise my print job for the third time of me trying meant that I had not been able to dedicate as much time to a carefully constructed three-part-AfL-crazy lesson. Instead, I had a worksheet and 27 enthusiastic, funny, caring towards each other students with a real thirst for knowledge.
My learning objective was a slightly vague "to be able to solve shape problems using our algebra skills" and my worksheet was a fool proof work sheet by TES user Steele1989 which can be found here https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/maths-algebra-and-shapes-worksheet-6267092. My initial thoughts were that perhaps it was too challenging for year 7 and that perhaps they would benefit from some input first, but then I remembered these knowledge-thirsty lovely people in front me. And I just went for it.
My approach, which I personally thought was pretty nifty as I recovered from my haze of printer anger, was to just let them have a go. See what they could do. See where they needed my help, that's if they needed my help at all. I set a timer on the board and every five minutes we would get a hint from a member of the class that had overcome a mistake, was particularly good at solving shape based algebra problems, or generally anyone who wanted to blow their own trumpet. These are the hints they came up with and I was genuinely impressed by their enthusiasm, they way they smiled through their mistakes and helped each other out as they made progress through the task.
It is easy to forget this as a teacher when you become bogged down in admin, Parents' Evenings, reports and school politics, but I am making a concious effort to embrace these wonderful qualities and use it to enhance the teaching and learning that goes on within my classroom.
One such lesson happened this week whilst teaching year 7. I will openly admit that this started out as what I call a "door knob lesson". A lesson that springs to mind as you turn the handle and open the door into the room. A suitably fitting word to describe this is "unprepared". I would like to add, however, that this lack of organisation was through no fault of my own. An incident with a student in another lesson, a member of the team being sent home sick and the printer (which is a good 3 minute walk away) refusing to recognise my print job for the third time of me trying meant that I had not been able to dedicate as much time to a carefully constructed three-part-AfL-crazy lesson. Instead, I had a worksheet and 27 enthusiastic, funny, caring towards each other students with a real thirst for knowledge.
My learning objective was a slightly vague "to be able to solve shape problems using our algebra skills" and my worksheet was a fool proof work sheet by TES user Steele1989 which can be found here https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/maths-algebra-and-shapes-worksheet-6267092. My initial thoughts were that perhaps it was too challenging for year 7 and that perhaps they would benefit from some input first, but then I remembered these knowledge-thirsty lovely people in front me. And I just went for it.
My approach, which I personally thought was pretty nifty as I recovered from my haze of printer anger, was to just let them have a go. See what they could do. See where they needed my help, that's if they needed my help at all. I set a timer on the board and every five minutes we would get a hint from a member of the class that had overcome a mistake, was particularly good at solving shape based algebra problems, or generally anyone who wanted to blow their own trumpet. These are the hints they came up with and I was genuinely impressed by their enthusiasm, they way they smiled through their mistakes and helped each other out as they made progress through the task.
Now this worksheet could have been an exercise from any set of textbooks , the timer could have been on a fancy tablet or state of the art interactive whiteboard and we could have been on the wifi on various personal devices answering these questions online. All these resources are costly, unreliable and go out of date almost as soon as the department all know how to use it. But the resource that had the biggest positive impact on the teaching and learning that went on in this lesson was free. The students. There is no link from which to download them, no inspection copy to order, no terrifying budget meeting in which you need to justify why you need them and we can give them a full six week recharge at the end of July!