Please excuse the language of this first one.

This was a very difficult class to teach. By the end of the year there were three classes to teach because the Int 2 part of the class split some finishing with unit 3 and some finishing with unit 4: Applications.

The first thing I will change for next year is to set proper ground rules for the students. The students were a loud group and could sometimes be quite demanding, more so than some of my other classes. I will definitely try to get them to decide on some ground rules themselves, things that they can expect from me and what I can expect from them. There was definitely too much noise in the class, I like a little noise but it quite often got too much making it hard for them to concentrate and thus producing even more noise.

Secondly I will use group work more so that the students help themselves more than me running around the class having to help each one of them. I will also be a lot quicker to go over something on the board if a lot of students are struggling with it. This will save me time and make things a little easier for everyone. Students won’t have to wait as long for help and I won’t have to run around as much.

Thankfully Intermediate 1 is now being taught as a separate class. I found it almost impossible to give as much time to the Int1′s as they needed. It is almost a completely different syllabus and there were some students who struggled with some of the most basic material. I could have easily spent the entire lesson with them but that would have meant neglecting the others. As it was the attendance of most of the Int1 students was bad but this may have been because I wasn’t paying them enough attention. I hope to make up for these next year when I teach the whole class.

I didn’t feel that I was as organised as I should have been for this class this year. I also taught it last year, but it was my only class then as opposed to one of many this year. Maybe I was to lax in my preparation a mistake I hope to solve next year. I definitely need to plan everything in greater detail next year and will hopefully have everything set up to make this possible – by having the whole summer to prepare for it.

I also hope to change up my teaching methods more next year. I got stuck in a rut a little this year – particularly with this class – hopefully I can use more interactive methods next year. This is another thing I hope to add to my planning. By mixing up group work with some interactive presentations and only trying to teach one syllabus at a time I hope to overcome the difficulties I encountered this year.

The class is only scheduled for 4.5 hours a week and this makes getting all the material in very difficult. I prefer to let the students try some questions – so they can see the style of them and so I can get an idea of how they are getting on.

The issue is that getting them to tackle these questions in class takes a lot of time and so to get through everything I had to actually schedule extra classes. I could have got through everything in time if I had lectured on the topics but that isn’t something I’m particularly happy doing. I don’t feel its a great way for these students to be taught the material.

Next time I will try to teach a little quicker at the beginning of the course which should allow me to take a little more time with the harder stuff at the end.

The course is also going online next year – that is the notes and learning materials and extra questions being put on the college’s VLE. I hope to use little tests on there to help the students explore some topics in greater detail. I tried to do that this year with a little project here and there but as with the rest of the homework – only some of the students actually completed it.

This was actually one of my biggest problems this year was getting the students to complete homework. The homework doesn’t count toward their final grade but they are meant to show continuous progress throughout the course. A little persuasion from the Studies Advisor (guidance type teacher) sometimes helped but it was as a rule difficult to get anything out of them. I don’t really know how to improve this. We’ve altered some of the assessments for next year to make them easier at the beginning of each topic and then increasing their difficulty as we get further into the topic. We have also added more multiple choice and I hope by putting some of these online the students might find the time to get around to the assignments.

I will also, hopefully, be able to use more presentations. I think that in higher there is a lot than can be speeded up slightly by using a presentation rather than examples on the whiteboard – sometimes they don’t need exact detail and drawing graphs on a whiteboard is quite time consuming. I’m also very happy because the projector has been moved in the room Higher is normally taught in – its been moved to right beside the whiteboard which will hopefully mean I can do a little of combined presentation and whiteboard work.

The other thing I’m going to use more next year is group work. I only used it a couple of times this year – but if I have a good topic (I used calculus to good effect this year) then it can be very useful. Now I know the course in a little more detail I can use group work to allow the students to investigate certain topics in more detail.

I hope I can put all of this into practice next year.

I set the students homework exercises but if I get a chance to teach it again I will start these exercises in week one so they get a proper grounding in the basics as these are very important for the rest of the course. Some topics are harder than others and I now have a better idea of those difficult topics and will be able to change the timings to take longer over these.

The course is split into two outcomes and I delayed the first assessment because the start of the second outcome used the skills tested in the first assessment, so by delaying the students got more practice with these skills.

Next time I will try as much as possible to use contextualised material for the engineers so that it isn’t quite as mathematical. I got the best response from the students when the material was contextualised – so I need to alter as many of the examples as possible.

Good things about numeracy classes this year was that most of them were willing to learn and the classes themselves were sometimes very enjoyable. I had several classes who were highly motivated and worked very hard.

I have many things to work on though. Contextualising the material is sometimes difficult and I need to work harder. Motivating some of the students can also be very difficult. Although some of the classes work hard many just want to get it over and done with and don’t want to work hard. I need to be better in explaining why numeracy is useful and in using tasks that keep the students interested.

I tried it in one of my classes this year – took a diversion from the course to look at performing simple calculations without a calculator and managed to get in a bit about converting units and fibonacci’s sequence. I got them to use their phones to look up the sequence and see if they could learn anything about it. Some were more enthusiatic about it than others but its something I think I need to do more of next year.

I also experimented with group work and presentations which although producing a slightly noisy atmosphere, it seemded to be quite well received by the students. I plan to use more group work next year but will need to be careful about the topics. The sometimes infrequent attendance can make this more problematic but I should be able to work around this.

I had a class the other week that would just not shut-up when I am trying to present something on the board. Every time I started to talk when I was at the board someone else would start a conversation with the person they were sitting beside. I tried appealing to their better nature and whilst it worked for most of the class there were still a few that wouldn’t shut-up.

Now I know of some teachers who maintain absolute silence during their classes. I’m not sure quite how they do it. I’m not that big a fan of absolute silence but maybe I start all classes next year by keeping them absolutely silent and then if I reckon they’ll behave let them talk. I can’t go back and change anything now I just have to deal with it as it is at the moment.

No not as in I didn’t know where they were but that I was working through an example on the board and my method didn’t make any sense to them. They pointed this out to me and I tried to explain my method in an alternative way but to no avail.

I finished the example and let the rest of the class get on with their work, at which point I went back to the example with the student. We worked through it on the board and they managed to explain where and how they got lost. Together we figured out an alternative method, which was more to their liking and I noted this down for future use.

It was nice to be able to fix someone’s problems quite so easily.

The class seemed to go quite smoothly and they behaved themselves quite well, at least until the observer left the room at which point they inundated me with questions about how I thought it was going rather than actually doing the work I had set them.

One observation/reflective thought I had was that this was the lesson I had planned the most – out of a whole year’s worth of lessons. Its not that I tried to do anything I hadn’t done before or wasn’t going to do anyway, its just that I made sure I knew everything back to front and sideways.

The result was one of the smoothest and best timed lessons I’ve ever had. It just ran like clockwork. Its got me thinking that there may be something to this planning lark…

Wow was I wrong. Having been put in the deep end with little teaching experience I’ve been preparing and planning as I go along. This means that sometimes I seem incredibly busy with a million things to do (when I don’t post anything) and sometimes I’m not as busy (when I get around to posting).

Now I like doing all the extra work and I think that the pupils find some of the extra work I do helpful – I get requests for extra notes and sheets but I know some other staff who don’t like doing (or don’t d0) work outside of the time they are paid for.

I know I wouldn’t be able to cope without working outside of the hours I’m officially paid for. I also think that a lot of the work I do outside of “my hours” is the most useful for the students. Its at these times that I produce the other notes, do the marking, write the feedback etc

Thankfully I had pen drive and was able to sort out all the problems. I’m glad that I don’t mind looking like an idiot in front of students.

I guess the thing here is that you can think you’ve planned properly and then something can still crop up that you haven’t planned for.  There was actually something I could have done to stop what happened but I didn’t think of it beforehand.