PGCE student would love some advice on feedback!

[devoncreamtea]

Hello all! Reading your excellent threads has been so helpful this year, as I complete my teacher training, thank you!
I am currently on placement and attempting to learn how to teach via zoom ... it’s a challenge! 🤣 Thankfully, I have been a SEND TA in school for a while so I have a little bit of experience to help me. I’m in secondary and really enjoy it. I am focussing my efforts on AFL and feedback at the moment. English, so lots of discussion. I just can’t seem to get it right. I get sucked into a rabbit hole of questioning and idea sharing but I can’t really tell yet when enough is enough or what is helpful/useful to the students. In my minds eye I can see the lesson I’m aiming for but I can’t quite get there. Any advice?

I teach a discussion-heavy subject too (history). I think it’s important for the discussion to have a bit of momentum and feel like it’s going forward, I think it’s OK for discussions to be fairly lengthy sometimes as long as they aren’t just going over the same ground. I find that they start tuning out once you’ve had several people sharing their ideas on the same point or question. I think sometimes we can fall into the trap of wanting to let lots of kids share ideas, especially with keen classes so my advice would be to have a few different questions and points that keep the discussion progressing and moving on to new ideas.
For online teaching I generally like to have an idea of a few key questions or statements that will scaffold the discussion (Eg. What were the main aims of Henry VII’s intervention in the Brittany Crisis? Did he achieve his aims? Does that necessarily make his policy a failure?) and stick to them. Sometimes I put the kids into breakout rooms in groups of 3-4 to discuss first before asking for input from just one or two people on each question. Sometimes I might ask one person from a group to summarise the discussion that their group had or to tell me what one other person in their group thought (this is useful to tell them before they go to breakout rooms if you’ve got ones that love to talk but don’t listen or let others get a word in). Another thing I find useful is to put answers (like yes/no, agree/disagree, or other options) into the chat as separate posts. They then all have to vote by “liking” the post that they most agree with and you can then just take one person from each side of the argument to explain why they chose that side.
I think it’s just important to have an idea of what you want to get out of the discussion and then make sure you are driving it. I work in a girls school where behaviour is generally excellent and the kids are incredibly keen to learn, but there is no doubt that they use being really keen to discuss and share ideas to run down the clock and try to spin out discussion so that they don’t have to do as much writing. Don’t let the wiggling hands in the air and puppy dog eyes guilt you into feeling like you have to let everyone answer a question.
Good luck!

Thank you so much for your reply! I will try out your suggestions. I am pooped today and felt like I’d never be able to do it earlier when everything went wrong in my lesson (😬) but I feel re-energised by reading that!

I’ve been teaching for well over a decade and am a senior leader now... I still occasionally have lessons where everything goes wrong. I had one at the start of this academic year with a new year 10 class which was a total and utter disaster. I had tech problems and let myself get totally sidetracked by them and then changed my mind twice about what we would do instead of the planned lesson. I confused the life out of the kids and they learned less than nothing. It happens. You’ll crack it.
I often compare teaching to learning to drive, when you first start you have to really think about every little thing you do, especially behaviour management, and then as time goes on those things start to just become automatic and it becomes less mentally exhausting.

Thank you! Yes it is like that! I’m on ‘reverse round a corner’ territory - simple in theory, impossible in practice...
Thank you for the support. 😊