hounddog32
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February 04, 2006
Sulihull NQT Conference
Friday evening and saturday morning were the sessions of this residential conference, held in Ettington Chase Conference Centre, near Stratford.
It was good to meet other NQTs in the the area, especially as I am the only one at Arden this year. Many of them have a very different experience to me, in much more challenging schools, but all seemed very confident and enthusiastic about their jobs. The first session was very much demonstrating the techniques that were being described, practcal demonstrations, discussion and evaluations with mini-plenary type activities. We were sat deliberately with people from all other schools and subjects, so lots of variety in input, ideas, experiences.
The saturday morning was the best for me, with some sharing of posters that we had done the evening before about how to plan a lesosn and then small group sessions which we had chosen. I was in groups on group work and assessment for learning.
Groupwork particularly insired me, it's a technique that I have used effectively in the past, but realisethat I don't use enough. Martin had some little plastic teddies to demonstrate different techniques that we could use, and we thought quite practically about applications. We covered envoy and jigsaw techniques were groups become "expert" on a topic and then teach others, either in a "home group" (jigsaw) or by sending "envoys" to other groups, each person swapping to take the role at different times. "snowball" is a technique I've used where pupils answer a question in pairs, then combine into fours to get a combined answer, then 8 etc until there's a final answer, perhaps a definition or description. Also, Martin recommended assigning roles within a group so that what pupils do is well defined, perhaps a questioner, answerer and someone who will record and feed-back - the third will keep the first two on task so that they don't look stupid at the end. Immediately I thought about how to use these in my y9 theory lessons, so I'll use som over the next few weeks.
The second on AfL helped me to think about learning objectives and outcomes, how to follow school policy and do what is best for the lesson. That may take some more thinking to be more effective.
The other thing I took fom the sessions was the need for positivity and praise in my teaching, this is something I'll need to continue to work on.
Posted by hounddog32 at February 4, 2006 01:33 PM
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