5.2 Before the visit In preparation for the visit the tutor will need to: Telephone the school to agree a date and time with the mentor and school co-ordinator for the visit. Write to the school confirming the visit. This letter should: set out the tasks and activities the mentor will need to do; request that a focus for the observation is agreed with the student teacher and mentor;
2.3.2 Synthesis Look at the lesson as a whole in relation to the agreed focus. Draw together an overall picture of the lesson where the identified strengths and suggested needs for change are all represented. Help the student teacher to identify connections and possible misconceptions.
2.3 Co-analysis of practice Carrying out observations of the student teacher is an important part of mentor activity and one of the major ways that mentors gather evidence to improve practice. Observations are most useful when they are followed by an opportunity for the mentor and student teacher to debrief the session, consider the implications of what happened and set targets for further development. This process of observation and debriefing is called co-analysis of practice. Observations provide evidence for f
1.1 Introduction Mentoring as part of the initial teacher training process is now familiar to many teachers in schools. However, acting as a mentor and the tasks involved in that role will vary depending upon the course a student teacher is following. In the OU flexible PGCE there are specific roles and responsibilities for both mentors and student teachers and it is important for participants to understand the expectations for each as they work together in the school-based aspects of this programme.
Introduction The OU PGCE has been developed by The Open University and its partner schools to provide an innovative, student-teacher centred approach to initial teacher education. We aim to build on the skills, knowledge and experience that student teachers bring to the profession, and then to prepare them for a career in teaching. The course leads to the award of PGCE, and Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) conferred by the appropriate statutory body. Working with a Partner Schools Network, the OU PGCE provi
1.5.7 Referencing We mentioned above that we need to reference sources to ensure we abide by copyright legislation. But there is another reason we need to give accurate references to items we use – so we can share it. Consider this scenario. A friend says they’ve just read an interesting article where Joshua Schachter, founder of Delicious has spoken about why it isn’t a faceted search system, and you should read it. How would you go about finding it? Would you start looking in a news database, a s
1.5.2 Ways of organising yourself How do you organise yourself? Make a note of how you organise your: emails internet bookmarks or favorites computer files your h 1.4.3 R is for Relevance Relevance is an important factor to consider when you are evaluating information. It isn’t so much a property of the information itself but of the relationship it has with your question or your ‘information need’. For example, if you are writing an essay about play therapy, a book or website about maths skills in the under-10s would not be relevant. So there are a number of ways in which a piece of information may not be relevant to your query: 1.1.1 Assessing your current level of knowledge
If you explore all the resources and activities in this unit, you might need to allow between two and nine hours to complete it.
Before you read this guide, why not use the self-assessment questions on the next screen to rate your current level of knowledge? Print or save these questions and for each question, mark the most appropriate number on the scale. When you have finished, you can review your answers. A score of three of less might indicate a gap in your knowledge Introduction This unit will help you to identify and use information in education, whether for your work, study or personal purposes. Experiment with some of the key resources in this subject area, and learn about the skills which will enable you to plan searches for information, so you can find what you are looking for more easily. Discover the meaning of information quality, and learn how to evaluate the information you come across. You will also be introduced to the many different ways of organising yo 2 Models of thinking In Section 1, you were asked to think about your own definitions of inclusive education. In Section 2, we show how personal experience of inclusion and exclusion has been a major driving force in the development of inclusive education, with disabled adults in particular struggling to redefine their experiences of schooling. One major factor in this struggle towards redefinition has been the shift towards a social model of disability. Rieser and Mason have described a model as ‘not nec 1 Inclusive education: Knowing what we mean There is no doubt that inclusive education is a contested area. Indeed, nationally and internationally, it is the focus of what Daniels has called ‘extraordinary debates concerning definition and ownership’ (Daniels, 2000, p. 1). In this opening section we will look at a range of perspectives on what inclusive education means – drawn from a variety of sources, both ‘official’ and individual. But first let us look at what inclusive education means to you. Acknowledgements Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this unit: Learning outcomes After studying this unit you will have: gained an understanding of ways that spoken language is used to create joint knowledge and understanding, and to pursue teaching and learning; considered the educational implications of some recent research on teaching and learning in face-to-face interactions; tried out some approaches to analysing the spoken language of teaching and learning. 3 Lesson delivery The way in which we deliver our lessons will have an impact on the students' interest and engagement in the work. If we appear enthused and excited by the subject that we are studying, then at least some of this enthusiasm will inevitably rub off on our class. The successful teacher will deliver his or her lessons with a sense of:
Pace: keeping the class and the learning moving forwards.
Clarity: knowing where th 1 Teaching and behaviour The quality of our teaching inevitably has an impact on the behaviour of our students: a student who is busy learning is far less likely to think about misbehaving. Using a range of strategies, positive approaches and rewards will have a positive impact on behaviour on a day-to-day basis. However, one of the key factors in getting sustained good behaviour is ensuring that your students are fully engaged with the work that they are doing. There are many factors that can contribute to mis Introduction The quality of our teaching inevitably has an impact on the behaviour of our students. This unit considers some of the factors that can contribute to misbehaviour in the classroom and some of the steps that we can take as teachers to re-engage students with the learning process. This unit considers the format of lessons, how lessons are delivered, how to present lesson content in an interesting and creative way, and the development of "engaging lessons". 6.2 Shaping knowledge It seems inevitable that any understandings we have will have been shaped and influenced by other (past and present) members of the same culture(s) we belong to. Most of these influences ‘just happen’: they arise out of our experiences as part of a culture whose members have had their experiences and shared them over many centuries. However, knowledge can also be deliberately influenced by powerful elements within a society: as we saw in Section 5.3, the church suppressed Galileo's reason 6.1 Knowledge and society If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants. Sir Isaac Newton (Letter to Robert Hooke, 1676) At the foreground of this final part of the unit is one of its more important themes – that knowledge is something held, developed and perpetuated both by and in the context of communities, societies and cultures. Newton's declaration to Hooke (above 5.5 How society constructs scientific thinking To understand science, it is important that we appreciate the contexts in which discoveries are made or suppressed. We can see from the account on the previous page that human understanding of the universe has changed significantly over time. The social and political climate in which scientists work has always had a profound influence on what can and cannot be said, done, published or even postulated as worthy of further investigation. (You could undertake a similar study of the debates on hu
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