My ongoing CPD needs

In the Stage 3 of my Individual Learning Plan I have undertaken a self-diagnosis of my strengths and development needs of my teaching practice and my written assignments. I have identified four development points for my CPD. In this task, I will reflect on those development points.

The first point of my CPD is to check students’ understanding and lesson outcomes during the lesson. When planning the lessons, I plan the activities in order to make sure that I check students’ understanding and learning outcomes throughout the lesson. I believe I use effective techniques to check students’ understanding, such as open or directed questioning, initial assessment activities, presentations or quizzes. Nevertheless, I feel that sometimes I do not check if everybody understood, especially the less active students. In my future practice, I will aim to make those students participate more and I will take and revise students’ work in order to check their learning more effectively.

Another aspect that I would like to develop in my future practice is the use of more effective differentiation strategies. In my lessons, I will aim to challenge all the students in the classroom. I will use different and varied teaching methods and strategies, in order to adapt to the different learning styles, but also challenge the students who do not feel as comfortable with that particular method or strategy. For the stronger students, apart from extending activities, I plan to give them more responsibility, such as helping other students in the tasks or explaining them how they got the right answer in a particular exercise.

In my experience as a reflective practitioner during the PGCE course, I have observed that it is common to share your reflections with colleagues, other trainee teachers, mentor or tutor. It is less common to share your reflections with your students. During the year, I have shared my thoughts with my students in a few occasions and I wrote about that in the ‘critical incidents’ assignment. However, in my future practice I will aim to involve the learners more in my reflections, because I believe their opinion is key to improve teaching and learning.

The last development point I have identified in my ILP is the improvement of my ICT skills. During my teaching practice, I have started using the IWB. I consider it is a very useful tool for the subjects I teach (Maths and Physics). It engages the students and makes the lessons very interactive. I will aim to improve my IWB skills. I also want to introduce more e-learning in my lessons, such as the use of mobile phones, forums and chats.