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  • Support for early career teachers
  • Education Development Trust
  • Year 1: First half-term: establishing a positive climate for learning
    • Autumn week 7

    Mentor materials

    Review and looking forward

    Intended outcomes

    The intended outcomes of this topic are for Early Career Teachers to review their learning across the range of statements in this module:

    Learn that:

    • Teachers have the ability to affect and improve the wellbeing, motivation and behaviour of their pupils
    • Setting clear expectations can help communicate shared values that improve classroom and school culture
    • Establishing and reinforcing routines, including through positive reinforcement, can help create an effective learning environment
    • A predictable and secure environment benefits all pupils but is particularly valuable for pupils with special educational needs

    Learn how to develop a positive, predictable and safe environment for pupils, by:

    • Establishing a supportive and inclusive environment with a predictable system of reward and sanction in the classroom
    • Giving manageable, specific and sequential instructions
    • Checking pupils’ understanding of instructions before a task begins
    • Using consistent language and non-verbal signals for common classroom directions
    • Using early and least-intrusive interventions as an initial response to low-level disruption
    • Responding quickly to any behaviour or bullying that threatens emotional safety

    Learn how to establish effective routines and expectations, by:

    • Creating and explicitly teaching routines in line with the school ethos that maximise time for learning (e.g. setting and reinforcing expectations about key transition points)
    • Reinforcing routines (e.g. by articulating the link between time on task and success)

    Activities

    Reflecting on learning (10 minutes)

    Welcome the ECT to the final mentor topic in this module. Offer praise where appropriate for the hard work undertaken in the module.

    The purpose of this topic is to review what the ECT has learned throughout this module through the lens of observations. They should come to the topic having carried out one or more observations of colleagues based on Activity 1.6 in the self-directed study materials.

    Ask the ECT who they observed, and with which focus. They may have completed multiple observations.

    Pose the question: Who did you choose to observe and why? What was the focus of the observation?

    Question for reflection (25 minutes)

    Ask the ECT to reflect on the following questions related to their focus area of the observation(s):

    • What did you notice?
    • What surprised you?
    • What did you learn?
    • How did X affect the pupil’s learning?

    Review of the module (25 minutes)

    Use Activity 1.7 in the self-directed study materials to look through all the statements that have been covered by module 1. The ECT will have considered two key questions as part of this activity:

    1. What have you learned in this module?
    2. What do you need to learn more about?

    Ask the ECT to share their responses. Support the ECT to come up with an action for how they can address the areas they identify in Question 2. Some prompts to support:

    • Which colleagues could the ECT go to learn about X?
    • What might be the focus of further reading?

    What might the ECT need to work on in terms of their classroom practice moving forward? How could they be supported to do this?