Transition Placement

Hi

I’ve recently started my PGCE in ICT at secondary school level. This blog will enable me to keep track of my experiences throughout the PGCE year. I feel that writing this blog will help me to gather my thoughts about the trainee year and education; it will also come in useful for my critical reflection assignment towards the end of the year. Having just completed my second week of study and my transition placement, I thought there was no better place to start.

   My transition placement was based at Ambleside Primary School in Nottingham. I found the staff to be very welcoming and also witnessed a lot of excellent teaching. The children were on the whole very well behaved, from talking with the teachers; I found out that behaviour of the pupils had improved drastically over the last decade and that this was mainly due to the discipline and classroom management used.

   In lessons I found that the majority of the school day was devoted to Literacy and Numeracy.  There was a big push on Literacy; nearly the whole morning was spent teaching it. ICT was implemented moderately but I felt quite effectively in all lessons. The school has implemented Promethean interactive whiteboards in all classrooms. They were mainly used in Literacy to display mind maps and to introduce and explain topics such as the Vikings. The whiteboards were also used to demonstrate handwriting techniques such as joined handwriting. In Numeracy the whiteboards were used to display starter activities such as daily dash, where the children had to perform sums using addition, subtraction, division and multiplication. The whiteboards were also used for interactive maths games where the children were scored on how quickly they answered times table sums. It was interesting to see how enthusiastic the children become when games are brought into learning, I will be looking to try and implement this into my teaching.

   During the week the main experiences that stood out were behaviour and behavioural management. The children’s behaviour on the whole was outstanding; I feel this is probably due to the effective classroom management used in lessons and the discipline instilled throughout the school. The main aspects I learnt were as follows; eye contact and body language are very effective ways of dealing with small behavioural issues without having to use your voice, I practised this myself during the week and found that 90% of the time, I didn’t have to speak to stop poor behaviour. Another thing I learnt during the week, was that when children are given I task they will enjoy (usually practical), behaviour starts to go downhill, this is something I have also witnessed in secondary schools. I feel that when you allow creativity to occur amongst students, their excitement levels increase and this can lead to behavioural issues. Although I believe that students should always be allowed to be creative, there must be some sort of control or focus in place to prevent the lesson becoming chaotic. I witnessed this first hand in a lesson involving paper mache, the teacher took a group of children outside to create George’s Marvellous Medicine bottles out of paper mache, whilst I had a group of children who had to draw design ideas for their bottles and come up with a design criteria. The group’s behaviour wasn’t overly bad; however a group of boys were quite chatty and could not really concentrate on the task at hand. On a side note, I thought a lot of the boys were kinaesthetic learners, mainly due to them using plastic bottles as drum sticks instead of reference points for drawing ha-ha. When the groups swapped tasks, the girls were much quieter and also concentrate very well on the task.

   Overall I thought the transition placement was an invaluable experience for my teacher training, I learnt a lot about behavioural management, how Literacy and Numeracy is taught, and the variations in Literacy and Numeracy levels amongst students and how ICT is implemented across the curriculum. I wanted this blog to be quite concise, so I will probably post about the transition placement again in the coming week, as I have yet to cover the transition between primary and secondary, EAL students and the school trip I went on.

Regards