Are there any plans that you had at the start of the year that haven’t yet come to fruition because you’ve been sidetracked? *puts hand up* Are there plans that have come out of events in the first term that you’ve yet to really even think about? *puts hand up*
The first term has been totally relentless and one of the biggest features regularly was that of evaluation. It started, as one would imagine, with evaluating the previous year and looking at how the department could make improvements and how I can improve my teaching:
What were our results like? Why? What can we do to improve? Is our monitoring effective enough? Are our assessments robust? Are our intervention systems effective? What can we do to improve our teaching practices? How will we do it?
Then for the remainder of the term, I felt like we were keeping a bit of an eye on the past whilst focusing our evaluating and questioning on the present:
What intervention are we doing? Is it working? How is everyone doing with the new marking and feedback policy? How is everyone’s marking? Are students in every lesson focused and have a thirst for learning? How is our teaching? What are we working on?
It really is a rocky term where you have to balance evaluation of the past, with evaluation of the present….and some kind of application from those evaluations. However, that’s what I feel we’ve lacked. Application. We’ve evaluated, evaluated, evaluated. But have we applied it? For many of us, we’ve been overwhelmed by planning, marking, assessing, data entry…and then restarting that cycle. Now it is #timetoembed.
My #timetoembed
- Better lesson planning for my sixth form lessons
- Differentiate to allow those students who are struggling to have more time to truly develop understanding
- Bring back in some effective uses of IT (e.g. Socrative, padlet, and giving students opportunities to use Prezi etc)
- Develop use of homeworks, including some more for sixth formers and independent research and use takeaway
What are you planning to embed?