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  • Support for early career teachers
  • UCL
  • Year 2: First half-term: inquiry into enabling pupil learning

    • Learning Intentions and Introduction

    Session Elements

    • action planning
    • analyse artefacts
    • discuss with pupil
    • self-assessment

    Learning Intentions for this session

    In addition to your personal focus, you will learn that:

    • Teachers have the ability to affect and improve the wellbeing, motivation and behaviour of their pupils.
    • Teachers are key role models, who can influence the attitudes, values and behaviours of their pupil.
    • Teacher expectations can affect pupil outcomes; setting goals that challenge and stretch pupils is essential.
    • 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.

    Introduction

    At the start of term, you reviewed your development needs in relation to Standards 1 & 7 with your mentor, using the Module 6 audit (this was based on the audit from Module 1 that you completed last year). Last week, at the annual conference, you examined the principles of practitioner inquiry, learning how to form an exploratory question, which examines the impact upon pupils of your normal practice (ECF Standard 8a); and how to collect evidence about your practice (ECF Standard 8d). By the end of the conference you should, with your mentor, have agreed what your exploratory question would be and how you would collect evidence about what impact your normal practice has on your pupils now.

    This week, in advance of your mentor meeting, you should use your self-study time to define what your normal practice is like in this area and collect evidence of the impact of your practice upon your pupils.

    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 the ECT’s assessment of it. They are in the words and reactions of the pupils and what the ECT has 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 break time, or you might share lunch with a colleague and quiz them about how they approach a problem in their own class.