14 Sep 2012

Busy but productive day, finishing with an observation of the AST in our department teaching a yr 7 class. The lesson itself was okay, last lesson on a Friday is never easy for anyone. However it was the brief conversation with the teacher afterwards that was the most interesting. He explained that he would rather spend time trying to break the bad habits of the girls had developed at their previous schools and instill the way of talking and learning that he and Newlands support than take his lesson further. He made sure the class were successful with what he thought was a fairly simple task -each person throwing out an denotation of a picture projected on the board, in order quickly and loudly- after they had been fairly poor at it. He sacrificed the latter part of the lesson to make sure they got it right and developed some of those skills. He also started to introduce the idea of a safe learning environment by allowing them to pass if they did not have a response, this is important because I have noticed that girls in the school have a large fear of being wrong or not knowing the answer, they need to learn that it is okay to be wrong and that they can learn from this.