Student Teacher’s opinion about teaching:


- “I was sort of two thirds of the way through my Open University degree in English literature. I felt if I was going to be a credible candidate as an English teacher I needed to prove that I was really in love with English.”

- “Teaching is fantastic because there’s just so much sheer variety.”
- “You have to be mega organized, however much you want to instill a love of your subject into people – and I think that is hugely, hugely important.”

- “The idea that exam results are very important is without question. So I took over, in my first year, a group of 12 pupils who were predicted C grades, most of them for their GSCE English and when their results came out, five of them got A grades, five of them got B grades and two of them got C grades.”

- “The most important thing when I came into teaching was that I had to have the attention of the pupils, and that I think you have to lay down the guidelines. So that was a challenge.”
- It’s much more interactive now, the teaching the focus is on what the pupils are learning during the course of the lesson, rather than how much the teacher actually knows.”

- “A good teacher is about striking the right relationship with your pupils. So that you can communicate with them, so that you can know what makes them tick, but at the same they’ve got to have that mutual respect for you so that they will work and they will get down to it – you can’t be too chummy, you can’t be too distant. You have to hit the right area in terms of the relationship, and I think that that is hugely important.”

- “The material you are working with is also very important: I’ve taught some texts which the pupils don’t enjoy, if they don’t really enjoy it they’re not going to engage in the lesson. Alternatively, I’ve taught some texts which the pupils really enjoy and when they’re enjoying it they learn more. So, the material is down to it.”

- “Your organization – you’ve got to be completely organized so that you’re moving from one place to the next so that you’ve got a coherent narrative going through your lesson, so that you’re moving to an end point so hat all the learning is taking place as well. So, organization, striking the right relationship – really, really important factors.”

- “Learning to teach, the most valuable thing you can do is reflect on the lessons you have taught, and that’s part of the process I’m going through at the moment in terms of getting my qualification. We are actively asked, quite rightly, to reflect on our teaching practice – what was good about that lesson? What could have been improved? It’s usually the teacher’s lack of focus and preparation that will lead to that learning not occurring. Pupils are generally very willing to do it and they are very able to be led, but they’ve got to be led in the right direction.”

- “Having done some teaching, you then need to think about what you’ve done in terms of when learning has been successful and when it’s been less than successful. So you need to make some sort of evaluation of what you’ve done in terms of teaching and assess what your pupils have learnt and then you can make a conclusion from that about the types of strategies that are effective, the things that work and the things that don’t work. But the things that work are not necessarily going to be the same in every context and I think that’s what makes teaching really interesting – the things that work in one school or the things that work with one class are not necessarily the things that work with another class. And that what makes the job fun, because you can think about different ways of putting your material across each time and I think that also reflects on this whole process of us as teachers growing and continuing to develop – we’re always finding better ways or new ways of teaching that we think might be an improvement on what we’ve done before.”

Next page: 2. Learning to Teach - Mentoring and Tutoring Student Teachers

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