Week 3

This week’s lectures were mostly focused on the theories of learning, writing assignments, developing thinking skills in Science, critical thinking, progression, starters and plenaries.  All of these lectures were great, we have already began to learn about the theories of learning, and I have done some reading into the behaviourist and cognitive families. This was great because when the lecture began, I already felt fairly comfortable with the lecture as I already had a basic understanding of the concepts, and had read about some of the key theorists e.g. Piaget, Vygotsky, and Bruner. I find this topic extremely interesting as you can relate the theories to different teaching techniques and to the ways in which I learn/learned. The writing assignments lecture also was surprisingly useful. As I have already completed a degree, I was a bit unsure of why we were being told how to write essays considering the amount of essays I have written throughout my education. My sceptisms however, was quite unjustified, as I feel more capable of planning and structuring not only an essay, but any piece of research or work. I also believe that now that I feel more able to organise my own work, I will be able to help students to organise their work more effectively. The lecture on starters and plenaries was excellent. Starters and plenaries are essential in every lesson, and there are many possible approaches to each. Essentially each have a very specific and different goal, however the same activity may be used as either a starter or a plenary. During the lecture I had the opportunity to devise both appropriate starters and plenaries for each lesson on a scheme of work. This was fantastic practice, because each activity differs and what may seem appropriate for one lesson might not be for another. As well as the information I have obtained from the lecture, I also have a book with ideas for starters, which I look forward to reading, as this will give me a good range of activities at my disposal.

In addition to the standard lectures, I also took part in official CEOP training on the 29^th September. This training was an amazing opportunity. While working with children, unfortunately throughout the course of your career, there will be children you work with who will suffer some form of abuse. Considering this, it is important for the child to know how both that how to report abuse, and understand that they can do it. By undergoing this CEOP training, I am aware of child protection issues, advice children on making online activities safe and reporting abuse.

My virtual school had a meeting this week, we discussed many aspects of the wiki, agreed on content and design issues. We also watched the EAL task video together as a group, and discussed which direction to take on the task. This week we also decided to assign 3-4 task leaders for each task, the role of these leaders was to direct the discussions on these topics/tasks. I am in the EAL leadership team, and therefore have put together some ideas on integrating one of the EAL students into our school.

Within our virtual school, we also visited our assigned school. Once again the school did a fantastic job of arranging people for us to talk to, and also allowed us to ‘roam’ the school to get a feel for the environment, check out any areas of interest, and experience the average noise levels of lessons (which was virtually non-existent!).