Teaching Placement - Week Three

Last week before the Christmas hols - but I've spent hours stressing over my one-hour lesson plan for Wednesday's Literacy lesson, and finding suitable resources on paper and online. I must have printed out several trees' worth of handouts. But I'll start at the begining.

Monday Surestart Literacy Class: Laura hadn't asked me to prepare anything in particular for this class - and she had said that some people would be sitting tests at college and there would have to be a fair amount of individual work. So I took part in the opening plenary sessions and then worked mainly one-to-one with Mark on an Entry Level activity while the others did their own L1 and L2 work. It became clear to me that Mark is not only dyslexic, but suffers from the same learning difficulty as my daughter - Auditory Processing Disorder. He can hear perfectly well enough to understand and reproduce spoken words, but when it comes to analysing sounds into letters, he can't differentiate between some vowels (eg a and e sounds) or discriminate combination consonants. So he might write "friends", for instance, as "fads" - because when he tries to write what he hears that's what it sounds like. My daughter does exactly the same, to the degree that her attempts to spell some words are so un-phonetic that they are impossible to even guess at. The other day she wrote "silver" as "seve" - neither I nor spellcheck got that one! In  Mark's case the problem is exacerbated by his regional accent, so his attempts at writing phonetically are even more undermined. I'll be interested to see the results of his SpLD (Specific Learning Difficulty) test - and if there's any useful way of dealing with this.
I also spent some time with other members of the class, managing to clarify some grammatical areas and progress with relationships. Most said they would do homework over the break - they are a committed group.

Tuesday Numeracy class:  Jo was away at a hospital appointment, but the rest of the class was in festive mood. Yasmin and I assisted Laura with plenary, group and indiviaul work for the first half of the session. We used packs of cards to do some work on odd and even numbers. I did some one-to-one with Gail, a Level 1 student, and found she had difficulty handling a pack of cards and sorting them into two piles (odd and even); evidence of chaotic thinking was that she was pulling cards from the middle of the pack, not off the top, and creating a third and unnecessary pile of "spares". Laura was interested by this observation - this is where my self help/psychology background comes into play.
When we moved up to the computer room after the break, Laura did an off-the-cuff plenary session, just using the whiteboard, on the theme of Christmas. It was inspired - engaging, simple, fun but including in the theme all the areas the class had been working on this term: weighing and measuring, decimals, number bonds, fractions, shape (menu-planning, cooking, buying, wrapping and and posting presents)... For half an hour the class were wrapt and having fun whilst a the same time recalling information, making connections and reinforcing the practical and relevant use of numeracy in real life. It will take me a long time to be able to pull off something as effective as that.
After that they paired up on PCs and played a competitive number bond ghost game, which kept everyone occupied and learning before breaking up for the festive season.
Yasmin has been offered a full-time but short-term job as a Learning Assistant at the college, and has a couple of other interviews lined up. Laura hopes she will continue to volunteer with this class as long as possible. These mixed ability classes in both Literacy and Numeracy, with students needing high levels of one-to-one support, are extremely hard to manage alone.

Wednesday Literacy class: Laura and I had reworked my initial lesson plan into something simpler and more manageable; I felt happy with the resources I'd brought along and had designed  a brief Powerpoint to incorporate (simplified) Learning Objectives and some key points about Conjunctions and Commas (the lesson subject).
As everyone came in - about two minutes after Laura and I had got into the classroom - I became aware that my conscious incompetence was proving a huge barrier to my normally high ability to multi-task! I found it hard to greet people and continue writing the letter grid (my icebreaker/recap activity) on the whiteboard, so Laura ended up doing the greeting while I wrote. Having got them started on the activity, I logged into the PC and put up my PowerPoint, then rushed back to the whiteboard to take their feedback input about words containing the the requisite letter combinations. It went fine, but I probably let it run a little too long - perhaps because I found myself totally floundering on the transition from that activity to the next subject. Luckily Laura smoothed the moment, but it quite threw me.
I did then manage to lead the class through the recap on Conjunctions and differentiated worksheets; then segued into a plenary on Commas and individual worksheets on that. Sue, the learner with mobility problems and dyslexia, claimed she had never before heard of a comma and didn't know what I was talking about (Laura says she likes to be obstructive at times, but to use her basic queries to revisit info for the whole class). I felt she might have been thrown by the fact that it was me teaching rather than Laura, and responded positively to her. By the end of the class we had progressed quite well.
In the end, the two hour class turned into a jointly run session by me and Laura, rather than mine for the first hour and hers for the second. By the end, I was more confident, had done some effective one-to-one, as well as plenary, explanations with a number of the students and seen some lightbulb moments. But I still felt very inadequate as a teacher.
Laura's constructive and extremely generous feedback was:
Positives: Authoritative manner, good subject knowledge, strong eye contact and positive relationships with individuals. The class accepts me (she says), and respects me. I give clear explanations and write clearly for the whiteboard and smartboard.
Points for development: Get into the classroom earlier and set up whiteboard task, Powerpoint etc. Don't rely on small writing lesson plan for a lesson guide. Write a big and perhaps coloured progression to leave on the front desk to avoid floudering on transitions. Greet everyone individually. Give more directed, individual praise for responses early on. Maintain pace - don't stick too long on an activity, make sure everyone is engaged and notice when they're not - especially those at the top and bottom of the ability spectrum. Use every opportunity to include related learning (eg homophones in the initial word-making activities).
Thank goodness it's over - and there's a break before next term.