Group Reflections

Project Reflection Hayley Coldman 0902201

Reflecting upon the project as a whole, I believe it was thoroughly successful and I feel proud of the work we have accomplished as a group. Personally, I feel I have learnt many new skills and enhanced my pedagogical knowledge and understanding, which is something I can take with me into future practice.

The parts of our project I found particularly valuable were creating resources and strategies to employ into a real classroom and identify whether they had a positive impact or not. This is because we have learnt lots of theory surrounding good practice within Literacy at University and we were able to tailor this to the class we were getting to know. We met a class who had ‘textbook’ attitudes towards writing, and therefore we wanted to engage them in the best ways we knew how, yet responding to their personal interests also.

The part of the project I found particularly challenging was implementing the majority of the work in the autumn term whilst we had many other assignments that required our time and attention. This was due to the nature of project, whereby we needed to put our strategies into action in order to give them enough time to take effect. Not only did we need to create the resources for the class, but it was necessary to go in to the school to introduce the strategies and ensure the class teacher was secure with our ideas. However, our group worked particularly well with taking turns to visit the class, as not every visit required all four of us to be present.

Talk for Writing is a concept that I believe is thoroughly effective and therefore it was refreshing to be able to carry out a project using a theory I truly believed could make a difference. However, as we only visited the class every month or so, it was difficult to measure the extent to which the strategies were being used. If it were our own class, we would ensure the strategies were being used consistently and to their full potential, however, this may not have been the case for our project. In part, this is due to the Year 6 upcoming NCT’s and time-constraints on the curriculum. We entirely appreciated all the effort and time the class teacher gave to us as it enabled the project to be all the more enjoyable and professional relationships to be formed.

A potential limitation however, was overcoming the initial barrier of presenting our ideas to an experienced teacher and explaining what we would like to happen. As students, this was something we found a little challenging and we did not want to appear too forthcoming, yet still demonstrate respect and confidence in what we were advocating. I feel we dealt with this professionally and gained experience in dealing with members of staff, including TA’s within the class. This was accomplished by good timekeeping, maintaining professional at all times and sticking to deadlines and commitments we made.

Project reflection Paul Everitt 1005169

When we began this project back in October 2012 I was in truth not overly excited about doing a writing project. Especially when I saw some of the projects that other people were given. However, that quickly changed and I got very engrossed in our project and now I am so pleased that we did take on this project. Not only has it been a great experience working with year 6 children (something I had not done before) it has also been wonderful to look at the teaching of writing in a different way.

I think that our group has complemented each other well as we all are quite different and have each have unique skills and abilities, as well as very different personalities. This has given strength to our group and also made working together an enjoyable and fun experience. I also think that these strengths have enabled us to succeed at what was quite a challenging project. Especially as we put a lot of hard work and hours in during the very busy autumn term!

The many approaches we have taken in the project have inspired me to think differently about how writing is taught in schools and how I will teach writing in my own classroom in the future. I am certainly keen to use and develop some of the strategies that we have tired in the project. I would like to use magpie books or writing journals in the future, have inspiring visitors in my class, to show the children I teach how writing is used in the real world. Moreover, I have seen how bringing in new books can really engage and excite children.

Another aspect of the project that has given me a lot to think about is the pressures of the school time table. Many parts of the project relied solely on the class teacher amending the time table and implementing the strategies and activities we had devised. The class teacher was very supportive of our ideas and made a lot of effort to implement our strategies. However, because of the time of year and the class preparing for the up and coming SATS, some of the strategies were not used as much or not at all. Also the children were really engaged and motivated when and shortly after we visited but this lost momentum over time. I will certainly be very aware of these pressures in my own teaching practice when taking on projects to ensure they are manageable.

Most importantly this project has opened my mind to thinking about the teaching of writing in different ways and the need for teachers to think creatively when teaching writing. We need to inspire and motivate children to write for a wide range of purposes and also make the teaching of writing relevant to children’s lives.

Project Reflection Emmalene Greene 10051686

The process of setting up this project has been very enlightening. I’ve learnt a lot about myself as a learner. I feel that my strengths in this project have been my organisational skills and being the main communicator with outside organisations and individuals. I felt that my weakness was my concern at times, about not being able to control all aspects of the project and allowing others to drive the project forwards. We often had to delegate tasks depending upon one another’s current workload, especially during our final school placement. From this experience I’ve learnt to delegate to people’s strengths and not volunteer to do all the tasks. I also found it quite nerve wracking being responsible for vetting outside individuals to come into the school, because how they performed once in school, reflected upon me as an individual. This is something that I will definitely encounter again in my career as a teacher and I will try to not be so worried about this.

The project in my eyes has been very successful because we’ve had an impact on how writing and reading are viewed and taught in the classroom. Not all of the strategies we implemented have been successful or manageable in the time scale. Aspects that were less successful usually relied more heavily upon the teacher being the main instigator and therefore we had less control over how often things were used. For example, the spelling mats were not used as often as we would have liked. For them to work they would have needed to be a part of the daily classroom culture, preferably on children’s desks so that they became a routine part of each lesson. However, it was unrealistic to think that all of our strategies and activities would be successful. I think that because we used so many different approaches we were able to let go of methods that didn’t work after a trial period. For instance, we had initially hoped to use more talk-partner work, but after modelling this approach and meeting with the teacher it became clear that such a strategy conflicted with the current classroom climate. Whereas other strategies like the writing games could be adapted into his current teaching style and were used successfully with positive outcomes.

The strengths of the project in my opinion were the way we showed our creativity and imagination. The writing wall, Magpie books, visits to the University campus to use the ICT facilities; word games, guest speakers and the author were real strengths and had the most impact. Through these creative plans we have illustrated how children have become more engaged in writing and developed a greater awareness of the importance of writing in the real world, this has improved their effort towards writing. If we had more time on this project I think it would have been effective to have held a whole school assembly so that the children could discuss what they’ve found most useful and encouraged other class teachers and pupils to perhaps start writing in a Magpie book!

Project Reflections Mathilda Lucas 1002871

Through engagement with this project I have developed my understanding of a variety of approaches to combatting educational issues. Upon beginning the project, we believed we could impact upon the children's attitudes to and achievement in writing via writing based workshops. Yet it soon became clear that a variety of factors were at play. I believe this has been by biggest learning curve during the past 6 months, education is interrelated. Although I was aware of this fact due to numerous lectures and assignments on the topic, actually going into school and seeing an emerging issue cemented this understanding. After surveying the children's attitudes to writing it was obvious it was not writing they were having trouble with it was the writing they were doing, how they were doing it and when. Using our knowledge developed in English assignments we knew the children needed a purpose and to see writing as something special. Using a variety of approaches seemed to be the only way to make this happen.

This leads onto the second learning curve I experienced from this project, the most obvious approach isn’t always the most effective. To use visitors who are daily writers and readers showed the children writing is not a task done in school in order to be levelled, although we could have told the children this I am certain they wouldn’t have believed us!

One thing I am very proud of from the project is the broadening of the children's reading habits. Previously the children were engaging in text after text by the same author gaining nothing but a habitual writing style. Through enabling access to numerous high quality texts across the project I do strongly feel we have had a large impact on the children's reading habits. The children are now engaging in graphic novels, detective stories, classics and fantasy. I believe over time this will have been our biggest incite of change.

What I intend to take forward into my own classroom in September is a greater feeling of responsibility. During the project we left a lot of the responsibility to the class teacher, we gave him ideas and resources and left it in his capable hands to implement where he saw fit. Yet due to National Curriculum Tests and timetable constraints, it was not always possible or plausible for the strategies to be introduced. This caused what the class teacher often referred to as a loss of momentum, the children would be very excited and motivated when we were there yet that fizzled as soon as the daily routine returned. Within my own class therefore, I feel I can now really consider the affect and reasoning behind all out, full on projects. I will consider what will have the largest impact and run with it, rather than trickling in minor bits here and there as I think during the project we sometimes felt disheartened if things weren’t used/weren’t working,  yet this was due to too much at once rather than the quality of the resources.

I am proud of what we have achieved. We did make a difference and we really encouraged change to happen through Talk for Writing.