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  • Support for early career teachers
  • UCL
  • Year 1: First half term: developing quality pedagogy (part 1)

    • Self-Study Activities

    Review: 10 mins

    Read the Research and Practice Summary on this week’s topic. As you read, reflect on:

    1. the practices that you are already doing well
    2. the practices you are doing some of the time, but could do more of/more consistently
    3. the practices you don’t use in your teaching yet

    Plan: 10 mins

    Self-assessment

    Think back to the last two weeks of your teaching (if it helps, think about one curriculum area, or one class) and focus on where you have used explicit modelling and scaffolding.

    Refer back to the research and practice summary on the previous page, then note down some examples of where you have done the following activities:

    • exposition
    • shared practice
    • guided practice
    • independent practice

    Ask yourself what went well and what did not go so well. Doing this will help establish your priorities for the independent planning exercise below.

    Theory to Practice: 20 mins

    1. Independent Planning

    Now look ahead to an area of your curriculum that you will be covering soon, where you know it would be helpful for pupils to have a degree of scaffolding and modelling.

    If, in your self-assessment above, you said you were unhappy with ‘exposition’, you might choose to focus now on modelling. Worked examples are very useful when sharing practice. As your pupils move from guided to independent practice, you might introduce and then withdraw scaffolds.

    To support you with independent planning:

    • look again at the example from Helen in the Pupil Referral Unit
    • remember to build in opportunities for your pupils to practise independently (Do you need them to work in pairs, larger groups or alone? How much time will you allow in your lesson?)
    • how will you judge when your pupils are ready to have any scaffolds removed? (e.g. Will you assess their readiness by selected questioning or circulating the room? Sometimes it is a good idea to allow pupils to choose to work with or without a scaffold)

    Next Steps: 5 mins

    Bring your planning notes from this session to your next mentor meeting. Be ready to discuss this activity with your mentor and work with them to review and refine your planning.