A Joint

8th March: Joint Observation by Laura (mentor) and Pearl (DTLLS tutor) of my Surestart Adult Literacy (Entry Level 1 - Level 1) class.

I felt well prepared and not particularly nervous about this observation. I'd been teaching the class more or less on my own since January and this lesson was focused around Instructive Text - identifying the features and structure; looking at planning; and ending up with planning and starting to write a piece of their own instructive writing. My main issue in this class is to include Mark, the dyslexic, Entry Level 1 student, in the plenary sessions with the rest who are spiky profile Entry 3 up to strong Level 1 - but I thought I'd more or less got it covered in this one, with individual work scaffolded and pitched appropriately.
So, started with a recap of last week's Descriptive Writing lesson: great, they remembered all the features and content from the extract of The Dragonfly Pool by Eva Ibbotson that we'd been looking at (older children's books offer some great pieces of text to work on with adult lit students). We went on to examine a range of beautifully laminated (!) examples of Instructive Text - simple/complex, with/without pix, discriminating between instructive/informative - and then I asked them to find real life examples of instructive writing in the classroom (including kitchen and toilet). I'd actually brought some fake ones with me to put up pre-class, but there was no need, there were plenty of examples, which they found: safety regs in the loo, fire instructions, kitchen dos and don'ts, community ads on the notice board... etc. And, helpfully, lots of examples of either plain informative writing or mixed instructions and info, from which I was able to clarify the differences again. An excellent Active Learning exercise - which had been suggested to me by Laura.
Next I had a pairs exercise - I'd laminated and cut up a set of slightly confusing instructions for escaping from a burning building which they had to put in order... great, they loved it and were fully engaged, but then I blotted my copybook by confusing the correct order when I worked through it with them and had to sort that one out - but it was ok. I think. Then I got them planning, followed by composing, their own piece of instructive writing based on the Wifeswap programme, which I rightly judged they would all have watched (where one wife swaps places with another, leaving an instruction dossier about her family for the other). This was a really good and relevant link to real life (TV watching and their own families), but unfortunately Pearl had never seen Wifeswap and had to have it explained to her by Laura.
Cut to the chase: Merit, with a Distinction on Relationship between students and teacher from Pearl and from Laura on Functional Skills.
Key Strengths: Planning and Preparation including Lesson Plan and SOL , Rapport with and engagement of students, Clear explanations, responses and use of flipchart.
Key Areas for Development: Insufficient differentiation/extension tasks, need better questioning to include and support less confident learners, to develop opportunities for active learning to encourage students to take ownership of own learning, and better visualisation of answers/resources to share with whole group.
My response to this, and the feedback sessions I had with both Laura and Pearl is that they were both encouraging, positive and seem to think I show lots of potential to be a really good teacher. I got the impression that as a non-subject specialist, Pearl would have given me a higher grade for more aspects of the actual teaching, but was talked down in several areas by Laura pointing out what I'd failed to teach or bring out in terms of Literacy content. Having observed two other Literacy teachers, I now think that Laura has extremely high standards for herself and me (which of course is excellent), but also a specific teaching style ("traditional", I've heard it called), which she expects me to emulate and marks me down (formally or informally) when I don't. Other teachers have a warmer, more relaxed communication style which may be less content-driven but works just as well to promote learning; I think I tend more towards that than Laura's style and she doesn't rate it. Because of this, perhaps, when I'm teaching she will often jump in with a comment or piece of information - pre-empting what I was going to say either seconds or minutes later, possibly in a different way. This leaves me feeling undermined and looking stupid sometimes, though I can never bring myself to tell her this even when she occasionally apologises for it.
In sum, though, I felt that both her and Pearl's responses were fair and positive and I can work on questioning, visualisation and active learning easily enough. What I do find hard is differentiating in plenary sessions, which I think are essential to inclusivity and maintaining a positive group dynamic. Sometimes I think it's worth letting less able learners take part in a slightly more difficult activity for the sake of this and to encourage them, without a massive differentiation plan, just support them as required. But obviously I'll work on this too.