Caught short

This was the first week back from half-term and the holiday is definitely over! Not only did I start back at College two nights a week but I also started a new job on Wednesday - I will keep applying for things...

I have a bit of a learning point from Tuesday's teaching practice, it's a big one actually. As usual, I'd planned the evening out beforehand with a range of activities. The objectives were to finish off the designing learning and assessment module and to introduce the next one - training delivery and evaluation. Nothing unusual there except that by 8.30pm we'd gotten through all the material and I there was nothing else to do but send the students home early.

Now that may seem pretty harmless, and the students certainly weren't complaining, but I'd essentially taken 30 minutes off the class time and in a busy course that's a little foolish. So, I need to make sure that if we finish early again I have something prepared for us to do. This could be an extra activity or something from the following week. I did have something I could have done and I must have thought, because we'd done everything I'd planned, we should just finish.

I've got a lot planned for next week's session (including a visualisation exercise) so that shouldn't happen again. Oh, and I need to book in another observation.

Didn't that used to be called improv?

This evening I included a formative assessment method in the session. I agreed with Margaret as part of my feedback that I would work on my assessment methods so I thought I'd have a go.

I included a quiz whereby learners would individually select a number (from 1-22) which would relate to a question about what we've covered in the module so far. The questions included areas such as Kolb's experiential learning cycle, Honey and Mumford's learning styles and the principles of training design. Overall the learners did well and only struggled with two questions.

I'll definitely do another quiz later on in the course although I may change how I run it. Giving each learner a question each to answer did rather put them on the spot and didn't give much thinking time.

I also learnt a new bit of teaching terminology in the PGCE class - reflection in action. That appears to be the technical term for when you change (of the cuff) how you are teaching something based on how it's going. Didn't that used to be called improvisation?

Tools just for teachers?

For this week's class, I continued to try out different techniques and methods based on last week's feedback from Margaret.

Mixing learners up for group exercises was particularly interesting. Rather than pick which group people would be in, I asked the learners to get in a line in order by middle name and then sectioned them into 4/5s. In most cases, this resulted in nicely mixed groups who performed well in the task. There was one group however were two of the learners clearly had, how shall I put this, very different personalities. So, my learning point for next time is to be conscious of who's working with who.

The other method I tried out was to ask learners to record the results of the exercise on the interactive whiteboard themselves. This worked well for a number of reasons. Firstly, the learners were eager to try the whiteboard out. Secondly, this cut down on feedback time. Thirdly, the group couldn't then criticise my handwriting. Result!