Skip to main content
Beta
This is a new service – contact continuing-professional-development@digital.education.gov.uk with any feedback
  • Support for early career teachers
  • Education Development Trust
  • Year 1: Second half-term: the importance of subject and curriculum knowledge
    • Spring week 6

    Mentor materials

    Review and looking forward

    Intended outcomes

    The intended outcomes of this topic are for Early Career Teachers to:

    Learn that:

    • Secure subject knowledge helps teachers to motivate pupils and teach effectively.
    • Ensuring pupils master foundational concepts and knowledge before moving on is likely to build pupils’ confidence and help them succeed.
    • Anticipating common misconceptions within particular subjects is also an important aspect of curricular knowledge; working closely with colleagues to develop an understanding of likely misconceptions is valuable.
    • Explicitly teaching pupils the knowledge and skills they need to succeed within particular subject areas is beneficial.
    • Every teacher can improve pupils’ literacy, including by explicitly teaching reading, writing and oral language skills specific to individual disciplines.

    Learn how to deliver a carefully sequenced and coherent curriculum, by:

    • Working with experienced colleagues to accumulate and refine a collection of powerful analogies, illustrations, examples, explanations and demonstrations.
    • Using resources and materials aligned with the school curriculum (e.g. textbooks or shared resources designed by experienced colleagues that carefully sequence content).
    • Being aware of common misconceptions and discussing with experienced colleagues how to help pupils master important concepts.

    Activities

    Reflecting on learning (10 minutes)

    Welcome the ECT to the final mentor topic in this module. Offer praise where appropriate for the hard word 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 4.5 in the self-directed study materials.

    Ask the ECT who they observed and with which focus. They may have completed more than one observation.

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

    Questions for reflection (20 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?

    Implications for practice (10 minutes)

    In light of the previous discussion, focus now on what the ECT will do as a consequence.

    Pose the question: what will you do differently in your practice as a consequence of this observation?

    Review of the module (20 minutes)

    Use the final activity in the self-directed study materials to look through all the statements that have been covered by module 4. 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 plan 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 ECTs need to work on in terms of their classroom practice moving forward? How could they be supported to do this?