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  • Support for early career teachers
  • UCL
  • Year 2: First half-term: inquiry into developing quality pedagogy and making productive use of assessment (part 3)

    • Learning Intentions and Introduction

    Session Elements

    • practical exercise
    • rehearsal
    • self-assessment

    Learning intentions for this session

    The focus of your inquiry for Module 8 is on an element of the Early Career Framework (ECF) from Standards 4, 5 or 6. You might have chosen a focus which combines different elements of these standards.

    Look at the individual case studies on the next page to see what the featured teachers had learned by this stage of their inquiries.

    In this session you will learn that engaging in practitioner inquiry, focused on the evidence base of the ECF, can have positive effects, not only on your practical knowledge, but also your beliefs, your workload and your professional relationships.

    Introduction

    Last week with your mentor you considered the wider range of emergent evidence for your inquiry: not just the evidence you collected deliberately (and for which you had an anticipated outcome) but the overheard and unexpected evidence too. Before that, you reminded yourself of the counter-evidence, or the potential negative consequences of your inquiry. Last week, you updated your ‘claim’ to take account of inferences you can make from all of these forms of evidence.

    How valid are the inferences you made? In this week’s self-study time, you should firm up the evidence to support the inferences you made last week.

    Finally, you are going to create an account of the impact on you of engaging in practitioner inquiry.

    A note on evidence and workload

    Schools are already data-rich environments.

    Practitioner inquiries first of all make use of what we call here ‘naturally occurring’ evidence. They are in the pupils’ work and your assessment of it. They are in the words and reactions of the pupils and what you have heard or seen of this.

    When we refer to evidence-collection, in the main we mean look at what the pupils have done, and listen to what they are saying.

    A practitioner inquiry invites you to be more systematic about how you do this looking and listening, so you might deliberately ask a few questions of a few pupils for five minutes at the start of breaktime, or you might share lunch with a colleague and quiz them about how they approach a problem in their own class.