Clip 11: Melanie's changed practice

Melanie:

When I first started this work – and particularly starting in this school – when we were talking about teaching practice, when we were having these conversations, we would go over and over and over the lesson. And it was really analysing the lesson to the nth degree. And it would take quite a long time, and often the teacher only had twenty minutes, half an hour, and we went way over. And, you know, at the end of it she would be hurrying out the door, and we‘d be trying to tell her what her next steps were, you know, and it probably wasn't very effective at all.

So now, as with Glenda and after that lesson that we've just seen, we’re looking at the impact of the teaching straightaway. We're not going into “How do you think the lesson went?” and all of that. It’s “What was the impact?” – so we are going straight to the students and listening to their voice, if you like. And then from that we are able to gauge how effective the teaching was or wasn't. And that’s when we need to decide – and I need to decide, you know, I need to really have thought about this quite carefully and quickly, but it is a shared process as well – what is, you know, the big, the principle, the theory, that we need to explore that really is going to have the impact on the practice.

With different teachers, the framework is still the same – the shape of the conversation is still the same – but what I need to be really clear about is where each teacher is at in terms of their strengths as teachers, and their needs, their content knowledge, their pedagogy, and all of those kinds of things. So that I can take them from where they are, so I'm not coming in over the top with this big theory that doesn't relate to them.

So it’s really starting from the teacher’s knowledge, the teacher’s strengths. And that was another really important thing in the conversation with Glenda, too – to note that her modelling was really strong. And so we don't forget about that; that’s a strength that we build on, and we use that strength to support the next bit of her learning, which was how to scaffold the children. And I guess, you know, that’s what I need to do as a facilitator as well; I'm using that same scaffolding process.