A bit of inspiration for us all.

There is something about teaching that has always appeal to me and when people ask me why I want to go into the profession (which, somewhat oddly, many people do), I often tend to joke I am attracted to the idea of a captive audience of 30 people that have to listen to the sound of my voice all day.  Obviously anyone with the slightest bit of classroom experience will know that this is not the case.  Firstly, because an input driven education is in most cases extinct these days, but mainly because children won't do anything that they HAVE to do.  To get children to engage with their learning, they have to want to do it.

I think my main reason for wanting to teach and specifically teach primary age children is the memory of my insatiable curiosity at that age.  Every day threw up a whole ocean of questions: Why is the sky blue? Why do cows have four stomachs? Why can't I roll my tongue? What is gravity? Could Jurassic Park happen in real life? I could go on and on and on...

The best teachers, the ones I really remember, were the ones that made these subjects come alive for me - that pointed me in the right direction and gave me the tools to find these things out - and above all, made learning fun, engaging and something that I looked forward to every morning.

Today is our first Professional Studies day - which means that we are midway through a whole day of lectures, seminars, independent study and discussion groups and already, two things come up that made me think quite deeply.  In this morning's seminar, we discussed the case study of a child named Michael.  Michael has a number of behavioural difficulties that his teacher is struggling to deal with and the case study was structured in such a way that only a small amount of information was released at a time about Michael, his homelife, his school life, his teacher's homelife and the school's structure.  After each disclosure we were asked: what is the problem, who has the problem and what can be done.

Within my group, at each stage opinions conflicted and it was interesting to discuss the various different viewpoints regarding one case study.  I identified that Michael only seemed to have a problem with the female members of staff and thought that a number of reasons could be the cause of this; from an absent father figure and lack of authority at home, through to a cultural reason: we were not made aware of Michael's ethnicity or culture at the start and I suggested that if he was from a devout muslim background, then he may take issue with female authority figures (something I have experienced first hand with a family that moved to the UK from Afghanistan two years ago).

As mentioned, within the session, we were asked at each of the stages, who has the problem.  Within my notes, I have apparently been very reluctant to assign blame to any one individual and indeed, it turned out that there had been a breakdown across the board, with failings within the classroom, the SMT and the school-to-home and home-to-school communications.  I think that it is important to remember that Every Child Matters isn't just a concept and we DO need to remember that the children should be kept at the heart of all we do.  It would be very easy to blame Michael for his behaviour, but I feel that in the most part, children aren't inherently naughty and it is our responsibility to try and understand that if there are problems they probably exist for a reason.  A lot to think about...

Anyway, I promised you some inspiration didn't I?  At the end of the session we watched a video entitled Inspirations: Everyone a Winner.  The video told the story of teacher called Trevelyan May who was awarded Primary Teacher of the Year 2005.  If I am honest, May is exactly the teacher that I want to be and I found the video SO inspiring!  Rather than talk more about it now, I may write a separate post about it later - but first I would like to know your thoughts. 

So here is my new hero Trevelyan May doing what he does brilliantly (and what I will hopefully do equally brilliantly in a couple of years time!):

http://www.teachersmedia.co.uk/videos/everyone-a-winner

The Gadget Show

You may have noticed that I have added a number of gadgets to my reflective blog.  I wanted to explain the reasons for them, because none of them are there by accident - they are all designed to allow fellow members of my course to enjoy my blog in an interactive way and facilitate the possibility to use it to aid your own reflection experiences.

Firstly, we have the fish.  If you haven't figured it out yet, they are interactive - you can play with them!  Go on, try it now.  Try dragging the mouse around the 'tank'.  As we should all know, there are many different types of learners and I felt that amongst all this writing, it was important to cater for the visual amongst you.  If you are a visual learner, you prefer images, pictures, colors and maps to organise information and communicate with others (Shires, 2008). You can easily visualize objects, plans and outcomes in your mind's eye.  For teaching practice, the interactive whiteboard will be your best friend and you love drawing, scribbling and doodling, especially with colors.  So the fish are for you.  A little bit of visual stimulation to get your blood pumping.

The next gadget on the blog is a 'Share it' box.  I appreciate that some of you may not wish to run a blog yourself, but may still wish to engage in the resultant discussions from any posts.  This box will allow you to share the post to your favourite social networking site and have your own discussion over there.  Feel free to invite me along too!

Below this is a search bar.  I can imagine that after a year, I am going to have posted a fair number of entries.  This will allow you to zero in on exactly what issue you wish to read about.  So if you want to revisit a previous post, type it in in here and the gadget will do the rest... =)

For the same reasons listed above - ie. you may not have a blogger account of your own, you may wish to follow the blog via email instead.  If that is the case, the subscribe by email box is for you!

Finally, the last and possibly the best gadget is the Amazon search box.  From time to time, I am going to discuss books.  It may be reference books that I have used within my work, it may be a book that I have found to be particularly inspiring or it may well be a childrens' book that I think will make a fantastic resource in my classroom next year - if you want to check it out yourself, you can search Amazon directly from my blog and find copies (new and used) for yourself.  I hope that this resource proves extremely useful over the next nine months.

Well, that is all of them for now, but if I do add any more at a later date, I will be sure to let you know what they are, what they are for and my motivation for adding them.

The importance of being earnest.

It seems only right that the first thing that should cause me to write a post for my reflective journal blog is a typical Rob-like drama.
I enjoyed a very productive evening yesterday, thanks to my partner staying on at work for an extra five hours to finish an IT project.  I usually struggle to work at home thanks to the distractions/convenient aids to procrastination and it is only when I can have the place to myself, turn off the phones and really spread out that I tend to get any work done.  I had found a number of really interesting government written and/or commissioned papers regarding the teaching of Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) in the primary key stages and made a great deal of progress on my formative assignment.  Particularly of note, in my opinion, were Lord Dearing's Language Review (2007) and the DfES' Languages for All: Languages for Life - A Strategy for England (2002).

Today I came into the university and proceeded to carry on with my research on these and other reports that I had found and in the process, created a blank MS Word document to paste any relevant quotes and ideas to that I felt would be relevant - and then SAVED IT OVER MY FORMATIVE ASSIGNMENT.  This means that I have lost all the work that I have done to date.

If I can take nothing else from this, it is the importance of earnestly backing up my work as soon as I make any changes - not to mention, check what I am saving and where.  If I were one of those annoying optimist types, I might feel that having to rewrite the assignment with give me more opportunity to reflect and review the material - however, I'm not.  So instead, I will merely settle for some wailing, a few tears and some gnashing of teeth...