Work Based Experience

I started my WBE today. In true British fashion, I didn’t know I was starting (I was told that a prospective placement provider “wanted to meet me”), and the teachers who are going to fulfil the mentor roles for my fellow student and I didn’t know we were coming until 10 AM.

Anyway, those are mere trifles, and I’m really happy with my placement – the college received an “outstanding” rating in every area from OFSTED in its last inspection, and has a well-resourced ESOL department, with a broad ability range of students.

Initially, it was intimidating going to the college, but once I got into my first observation, I settled down and became much more comfortable. One of the primary reasons for my nervousness was simply not knowing quite what to expect from the observations, but I felt much better when the class started and I realised that I understood what the instructor was doing. This started me thinking about what I hope to achieve in terms of professional development – it was apparent to me that the activities I was seeing were activities that I understood, and would even use myself.

After some thought on the subject, I have come to the conclusion that my primary motivation for being here is not simply to learn teaching “techniques”, although I naturally expect the course to influence my technique (an important distinction). There are thousands of different activities and so many different approaches to learning that I could bury myself in activities and copies and handouts and flashcards and still not improve as a teacher. It struck me that since I understood what the teacher was doing in those classes, I should probably focus on what the learners are doing, since this is what must ultimately inform a teacher’s choices – both in the classroom and in the staffroom – when they are preparing their lessons and delivering them. I realised that there’s a significant difference between understanding the whats and understanding the whys of teaching, and that I want to learn to think more from the students’ perspective when I’m planning and delivering lessons.

I also saw an interesting technique for managing students’ Individual Learning Plans. At the end of each session, the teacher handed out each student’s ILP, and had them note down the lesson objectives and some brief examples of the target language – this meant that the students have a concrete record of what they studied in the lesson, and can relate that to their plans. In that respect, it seemed useful. This started me thinking about planning. I’m wondering how to best integrate students’ ILPs into the planning process – it strikes me as very time-consuming and unwieldy to sit with students’ ILPs in front of me while planning sessions. Perhaps there is a way to integrate the most salient parts of a student’s ILP into the scheme of work – almost like the tags that appear on many websites to sort by category… It seems I have more to think about…

Explore posts in the same categories: ESOL, WBE, reflective practice, teaching

Tags: Impressions, Student-centred Learning, Teaching Practice, Work Based Experience

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