This evening I found my USB stick from my PGCE year. The array of resources on there, well… they were interesting to view. I can see such a progression from my initial lessons to the ones at the end of my course despite the ‘criticism’ I experienced at my second placement; there’s such a vast improvement plus so many ideas and activities I’d forgotten about.
If I’m honest I was just as creative then as I am now though, but there is such a huge difference in the quality of the resources and learning activities. My teaching style has definitely improved with time.
The one that I found particularly interesting was the one that got me my first teaching job with. I was asked to give an introduction lesson to a new topic on Italy. I remember deciding that the best approach since it’s a geography lesson would be to locate and map the human and physical features of the country.
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I have to say though I’m particularly shocked by the resource. Now I’m not saying the quality of the teaching activities had been poor but I’m slightly embarrassed by the presentation.
I can clearly tell that at that stage I knew very little about SEN requirements and adaptations that could be made to PowerPoints to suit particular SEN requirements like dyslexia. Now my resources look something like this…
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More engaging and presentable I reckon.
Despite my resources they must have clearly seen something in me because if I remember rightly I was also eaten alive by the class of year 9’s (who I later went on to teach) and was still very shy, timid and introvert.
Taking a look at my resources has got me all thinking about the struggles and successes of my PGCE and NQT years. I could write a whole reflective post on my time as a PGCE student and NQT but I’ve got baseline assessments to get on with marking. I might update this at some point….. for now I just thought I’d share my recent findings.
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