Morning!
Just a quick post to share some resources … following the realisation that ITT students were not going to be able to finish their final teaching placement a few weeks ago, I put out a tweet. I’d been thinking about how nervous most teachers get after just six weeks off in the holidays and got to thinking that for these guys it would be even worse and was there something we could do to support. Because we’d spent lots of time back in 2015 to 2017 doing “getting ready to teach” events as part of our secondment as Pearson Credible Specialists from our day jobs as teachers I thought that was something we could look at :
As it turned out there was lots of interest and so over the last week we’ve done three online sessions (the first of two for each group) which have been attended by about 120 people … Seager was supporting too! I somehow managed to rope him in to it. What I have learnt is that talking to 60 people online is really tough when they’re on mute – its amazing how much I’ve come to rely on the feedback/cues you get when presenting to people in person. I’ve also learnt that 20 is probably a nice number to present to when doing online stuff as you can have some interaction … I particularly enjoyed the Sunday morning crew!! **Waves**
Session 1 was looking at the historical context of the GCSE in its current format and the structure. It was all non exam board specific but I think I gave a shout out to the support from all of them ….. the main takeaway should be to check out the education select committee site and some of the historical reports and evidence presented at the enquiries to understand why we’ve got what we’ve got but more importantly it’s not all about exam boards. These changes were driven by the DFE and the process by Ofqual. I’ve promised to share the slides and also the requirements document from Ofqual which includes the DFE content (*thanks to Graham Cumming at Pearson for sending me a PPT I could use to get me started on this initially! I have used a couple of questions from exam papers to illustrate AO types … hope that doesn’t get me into trouble!!)
With all these things when it comes to sharing PPTs there is only so much that you can take from the information and there is so much more that was said verbally (there’s my health warning! its all about context!). That aside, we’ve got part 2 to come from all three groups and now we’ve got the dry material covered we’ll look at how grades are awarded and some of the lessons we’ve learnt along the way. I suppose there is a little part of me that wants to teach people this so I can avoid losing it when “maths-twitter” doesn’t understand why grade boundaries can move every exam sitting.
If there is enough interest we are happy to repeat this series of two sessions over the next couple of months – but I’d also like to investigate the opportunity to look at what we can do to support ITTs/NQTs on an ongoing basis between now and September but also in the first six to eight weeks of their new jobs in September. I don’t know what I have in mind and maybe its something one or all of the boards (you have my email!) would be interested in supporting … thinking caps on and if you have any ideas please do get in touch!!!
I am passionate about what we can do to support our new teachers to the profession – its a perfect storm brewing with regards teacher recruitment and retention and we need to ensure that those coming into the profession are properly supported and prepared. This was the least we could do …with everything else that has been going on it’s been good to feel useful.
