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  • Support for early career teachers
  • UCL
  • Year 2: Second half-term: inquiry into engaging pupils in 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, the case studies are a reminder that:

    • Regular purposeful practice of what has previously been taught can help consolidate material and help pupils remember what they have learned.
    • Requiring pupils to retrieve information from memory, and spacing practice so that pupils revisit ideas after a gap are also likely to strengthen recall.
    • Worked examples that take pupils through each step of a new process are also likely to support pupils to learn. - Explicitly teaching pupils the knowledge and skills they need to succeed within particular subject areas is beneficial.
    • In order for pupils to think critically, they must have a secure understanding of knowledge within the subject area they are being asked to think critically about.
    • Pupils are likely to struggle to transfer what has been learnt in one discipline to a new or unfamiliar context.

    Introduction

    At the start of this half-term, you reviewed your development needs in relation to Standards 2 & 3 with your mentor, using the Module 7 audit (this was based on the audit from Module 2 that you completed last year). You also constructed with them an exploratory inquiry question, which will help you focus your development across this module. Last week, in your ECT Training session, you looked again at the nature of school-based evidence and discussed issues of ‘sufficiency’ and ‘validity’.

    Next week, you have another mentor meeting. To prepare for that, you should use your self-study time to define what your normal practice is like in your focus area and to collect evidence of the impact of your practice upon your pupils. It is helpful for any teacher to get into habits of monitoring your practice, reviewing its impact and implementing useful changes.

    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 breaktime, or you might share lunch with a colleague and quiz them about how they approach a problem in their own class.