Summary

This week was cut short due to a Monday/Tuesday bank holiday. After an incredible trip to Livingstone and Victoria Falls for the bank holiday, teaching resumed as normal.

What went well?

In the short time I had with the students this week, I noticed myself becoming far more comfortable and confident in my teaching role. Moreover, where some students had been shy last week – at times reluctant to engage in the lesson, or quiet when speaking one on one – almost everyone was consistently volunteering to answer questions. 

Having noticed some Grade 5 students’ difficulties in doing basic multiplication and division, I focused on these as standalone skills this week. We covered some basic ways of dividing and multiplying small numbers before moving onto long multiplication. I’m glad I made this shift – some students who were getting noticeably frustrated at computing the radius and diameter of circles caught on quickly. Struggling with advanced concepts because you haven’t got the underlying skillset is bound to be frustrating. The morale boost provided by addressing this issue was clearly beneficial. 

This shift also led me to adjust one of my SMART goals, regarding Grade 5 maths. I decided that it would be best to spend the rest of my limited time at Star Top focusing on the fundamentals, not ticking off the final chapters of the textbook. The students have two full years before their first public exams, and shaky fundamentals will do far greater damage than slightly slower progress.

What could have been done differently?

The downside to the students becoming more comfortable with me is that they have also started to misbehave more. Mostly, this is just being cheeky rather than malicious, but there have been a number of occasions this week where I have been writing on the board with my back turned when an argument breaks out. I noticed that I wasn’t very confident in responding to these incidents, as I often hadn’t seen the start of it and fingers were being pointed at all sides. Deciding on a general strategy to deal with this will hopefully help me next week in better managing the classroom dynamic and establishing a clear precedent for what happens when students start shouting at one another.

While last week I was anxious to be as prepared as possible for each lesson, I let that slide a little this week, which I’m not proud of. It was ok for Grade 5 maths, as the lessons followed a fairly formulaic pattern, but less so for Grade 6 science. I ended up working more out of the textbook, which I found to contain some mistakes. Though this didn’t hugely affect my lessons, it definitely made me a little less relaxed each morning and during each lesson. Next week, I’ll make sure to plan each lesson fully and clearly the night before.

Leadership reflection

The choice to reassess the work I’m doing with the Grade 5s required both bravery and ambition. I decided to make a detour from the planned path (and textbook) and come up with my own resources. This was ambitious – with end of term tests coming up soon for the Grade 5s, getting them all to a strong position with long multiplication and long division will be a considerable task. The planning involved meant the capacity I leant into most this week was performance – I had to be creative in designing engaging and easy to understand activities, as well as setting out a strategy to achieve my goal within the next couple of weeks.

An honourable mention goes to extraordinary – while nothing I did was particularly extraordinary, the Victoria Falls certainly were.