Year 1 Reflection
A Positive Change
I feel that during this course I have concentrated more on my lesson planning and the positive outcome of that has been my timing. Previously, when I didn’t plan so thoroughly I found that some activities would go on longer than I had expected or that I had given students too much time to complete a task. After thinking about the material, language and methodologies, I effectively ‘felt’ my way through each lesson and the timing of each stage. This was very often successful, however occasionally I wasn’t able to cover everything I had intended, or covered everything with too much time to spare.
Thinking about my timing in lessons meant that I had to reflect on my teaching to determine when the timing was going wrong. Now I feel I am better able to judge the timing of different activities at different levels and this enables be to better judge how to differentiate between weaker and stronger students.
In saying this however, I feel I could further develop my ablitiy to successfully differentiate betweek level and strengths and weaknesses. I feel that I am mainly differentiating between differences in general English level and speed of students completing activities, but I would like to focus more on differentiation on specific, more atomistic, weaknesses. For exampl where some students in the class have severe handwriting difficulties and others don’t. More importantly I’d like to learn how do differentiate effectively for learning difficulties. So far in FE I haven’t had many students with specific learning difficulties, however, this is likely to change due to expeosure, and I would like to be confident that I can do this successfully when the need arises.
Pip, though this is more on the subject of e-learning and learning difficulties; thought it may be of interest: http://www.rsc-ne-scotland.ac.uk/accessapps/
The College should provide USB at start of course!
This looks interesting. I’ve downloaded the fill apps and will take a look at it this week. Thanks.
There used to be a really good government website http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/curriculum_esol/access/ that gave really good ideas for dealing with various disabilities and learning difficulties – Viv may have shown you. anyway, it has now been changed to the gateway to excellence – so excellent that you cannot access any of this information any more ggrr.