Experience during placement

Once again bloggers welcome back! Throughout todays blog post I am going to be discussing my experience from my time spent on placement in Georgetown Primary School over a two week period in January of 2018. The blog is going to reflect on my time in the school and I will discuss what I learned and gained throughout the experience. Georgetown Junior and Infants Primary School is a school within Tredegar, Wales. The new school as it stands opened in 1989 and the nursery in September 2003, although the site was new Georgetown primary had been serving the communities educational needs since 1877. (Thomas, 2017) Georgetown is a state funded primary school which follows the Welsh national curriculum and is controlled by the local authority in final decisions. (British Government, 2015)

The schools head teacher is Lisa Thomas, appointed to the role only in September 2017, within the school report she looks to improve the school more and more over the coming year to improve results. (Thomas, 2017) The school caters for children from the ages of 3 through till 11, with nursery, infants and juniors. Within the whole school the team caters for 431 pupils, 202 boys and 229 girls. (Department of Education and Skills, 2017) The amount of pupils Georgetown caters for (431) is much higher than the U.K’s average of around 260 pupils. (Bolton, 2017)

Georgetown is currently ensuring children are digitally competent as I observed throughout my placement that every day in almost every session the children were using iPad’s and computers to complete work or assist them in completing their work. The children used multiple apps which I was not even familiar with, these were mainly ‘popplet’ and ‘seesaw’ but after a quick demonstration by the children I was able to use them. The reason children are digitally competent within the school is due to the head teacher using the new ‘Digital Competency Framework’, with the head teacher stating that “These skills are central to a young person’s success in life and are integral to learning. The competence strands we deliver are information, communication, content creation, safety and problem solving.” (Thomas, 2017)

Throughout my time at Georgetown Primary I believe my skills were enhanced, learning new skills and gaining new knowledge from both the teachers and the children. One of the major skills which I have gained from my extensive time at the schools is the need to be creative and have freedom with adapting to the needs of the children within lessons. Within these lessons to cater for the needs if each child the lesson plan does not have to be fully followed but is made flexible that changes can be made. Working alongside Miss Davies, she gave me freedom to help the children in tasks in my own way, not telling me how it should be done but just agreeing as long as each child understands the concept the path to get there should be varied for each child.

Another skill which was enhanced and developed from the placement was collaboration. The school mainly had two classes in each year and to ensure that the best possible teaching and outcomes were achieved the two teachers of each year would plan and reflect on sessions together. This was beneficial as I was working with two very talented teachers which allowed myself to gain two different approaches to teaching. According to Garvey (1984) when implementing collaboration, teachers should communicate with learners but to ensure that the learner collaborates back through the use of language they need to talk about the learning experience. Teachers should ensure that a variety of opportunities are available for learners to collaborate between one another, using discussions in problem solving, playground and talking in groups are useful activities to ignite collaboration. Within the school leadership skills were demonstrated daily, with the head teacher going to each class daily to see what was happening how the children were, this was gaining a good rapport with other staff members as they were able to see a higher authority leader daily to discuss any issue or concerns.

Throughout placement Miss Davies demonstrated how when teaching she would use different ways to complete tasks, each lesson would vary using I.T, physical activities, storytelling and many more. She gave me the task to create a task for numeracy which would develop the children interest which I successfully completed through the use of physical activities, which was creative as the children were able to learn numeracy differently. The task was a team based activity where the children had to work together to get from one side of the courtyard to the other by using bean bags adding and subtracting. According to Kerry (2015) the issue with some practitioners is that many became displacement and fall in to habits using the same creative aspects instead of changing. Varying between creative aspects through cross curricular teaching would keep learners engaged and want to learn instead of being bored because the same projects are used. (Kerry, 2015)

Within my short period at Georgetown Primary I was able to come to the understanding that I am not that digitally competent as I once thought I was. Especially with digital competency at the forefront of the new curriculum I want to further improve my skills in CPDs and throughout the remainder of my time in university I will seek help using new equipment like green screens and coding.
In summary, the experience as a whole was very beneficial I was able to learn new skills and develop current skills. The experience allowed myself to gain an insight in to more than just teaching but also the planning side of the job. The experience as a whole was very beneficial as I was able to be inspired by doing what I really enjoy, teaching the children of the day and inspiring them through education.

Reference list.

Department of Education and Skills (2015) Types of Schools. London: British Government.

Available at: https://www.gov.uk/types-of-school  (Accessed: 20 March 2018).

Department for Education and Skills (2017) My Local School-Georgetown Junior and Infants.. Cardiff: Welsh Government. Available at:http://mylocalschool.wales.gov.uk/School/6772074?lang=en (Accessed: 19 March 2018).

Bolton, P (2017) Annual Abstract of Statistics, various Education departments' reports of school/pupil censuses. London: UK Government (Accessed: 18 March 2018).

Garvey, C. (1984) Children’s Talk. London: Fontana.

                 

Kerry, T. (2015) 'Introducing cross-cuticular teaching', in Kerry, T. (ed.) 

Cross-Curricular Teaching in the Primary School: Planning and facilitating . London: Routledge. p160.

Thomas, L. (2017) Georgetown Primary School Annual Report. Internal report. Unpublished.