This week, we were able to get back into the classroom. Thus far, we've have classes at university and have had meetings within our STC [school training centre] but until now, we've not actually sat in a primary school lesson.
On Thursday, I observed a wonderful yr1/2 teacher. She was incredible. Everything ran like clockwork, the activities were perfectly timed and varied enough to keep the children engaged. The focus was phonemes, as she said some of the children were still struggling to fully grasp them [I don't blame them - they are something I'm going to need to get over lol!]. Activities included group reading, where the children seemed really interested in what they were doing. Carefully crafted questions ensured they retained knowledge of things they had previously read and every child within the groups contributed answers willingly.
Also, linked to something my STCC said - the teacher was incredibly quiet and calm. In turn, the classroom was quiet and calm. The children and the environment reflected the teacher. It made it a wonderful environment to learn within, because they children were still contributing and completing varied activities, but there was no shouting or unpleasantness. An observation I did at a different school yesterday further demonstrated this idea. The teacher had a difficult job, as the children ranged from level 2 through to 5. Consequently, she utilised the TA to lead an activity with the lowest ability groups [after working/teaching as a whole class first], so that she could look at more complex ideas with the rest of the class. This lead to a lot of noise and the teacher did have to shout - not out of anger or anything like that - quite loudly just be heard. There was a permanent buzz of noise over which she was trying to teach. In that situation, it is hard to know what to do for the best, but it seemed to mirror my STC. He said the louder the teacher has to be, the louder the class will be. Sort of a negative cycle. I can definitely appreciate that now.
As mentioned, we went into a different school yesterday to observe maths lessons. In the first, the year 6 lesson mentioned above, we mainly observed. Simply because the teacher taught at the front of the class for much of the lesson [the children completed questions on their whiteboards] and so it didn't seem appropriate to wander around the room - we thought that would be distracting and unhelpful. In the second lesson, however, the teacher made use of us and we all seemed to get a lot from it. In pairs, we led groups playing games to improve their knowledge and confidence with doubling. The teacher said she was a great believer in games and she had a big bag of resources to play all sorts of games - from the 'doubling fairy' to games using dice etc. Once again, the children seemed very engaged and there did appear to be some improvement in their ability over the course of the lesson, although some still struggled and felt most comfortable drawing and counting dots to work out the answers.
People have said a lot that teachers must share, borrow and try out ideas they've seen elsewhere. In that vein, I think games can provide a great starter during a lesson, although I would probably balance that with a little bit of independent work, so the children can make some record of their learning. I would love to be a quiet teacher, like the wonderful teacher I saw on Thursday, to create such a calm environment. And, from the year 6 teacher, I would be keen to adopt her approach to encouraging pupils to find their own methods. She told them to try as many different methods as they could and not to worry if one or two don't seem to work for them - rather, just to try them out and hopefully discover one or two that really make sense and 'click' with them. That sort of flexibility within mathematics has been talked about a lot in our maths classes, so it was great to see it actually happening within school. :)
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