Observations of Teaching Practice: Reflections
After observing my peer, and receiving my feedback from both my tutor and coursemate, it’s clear that I have some areas to work on in my teaching, but also that there are many positive points. As a habitual victim of imposter syndrome, I have often struggled with feeling valid and worthy of being in my role – it is a large task to feel responsible for the careers and employability of the students of Camberwell and Chelsea! By completing this exercise, it has allowed me to gain focus on areas that need work, and to expand on the areas that are already working well.
Firstly, by observing my peer, I gained a great insight into my own teaching practice. Viewing someone else teach a cohort of students is extremely valuable to me because it allowed me to see how they structure their lesson; if there was any pre-work involved and how this was managed throughout; if they included activities to engage students; and how they met the learning outcomes of the course or session. During this observation I often found myself thinking that I would have structured certain parts in another way, or that my peer had included something I had never thought of doing before – all of this beneficial to me. This exercise solidified that there is no one ‘correct’ way of teaching, or engaging students, or imparting knowledge, but designing, teaching and evaluating learning is a symphony of direct learning from the teacher, solo self-directed work, discussive group work and activities, student-teacher one-on-one time, and future work and assignments. All of these are areas in which I will be examining my own lessons, and how to implement them.
My feedback from my tutor allowed me to see real depth of knowledge into the subject. Like all of the observation exercises, there were no particularly negative points but there were suggestions for improvement. These areas were:
- Pace and delivery – by varying the pace, visually and verbally, this would allow my students to absorb the knowledge, process information and would perhaps instigate more questions and discussion.
- Structure and organisation – instead of ‘verbally matching’ my presentation, I should instead use these as prompts that allow me to give further information.
- Interaction and engagement – setting pre-tasks, or encouraging discussion pockets throughout my lessons will allow me to gauge student understanding and evaluate how to proceed.
- Knowledge dissemination and production – instead of adopting a hierarchical approach of teacher to student, I could benefit from giving out less information and encourage students to find the answer themselves, adopting a more lateral relationship with them.
My tutor provided me with lots of positive feedback, but these areas really stood out to me as workable things to discuss with my manager, and my colleagues, to find out more of how to adopt these processes.
Finally, my review from a peer was, again, very insightful and useful to my progress as a practitioner. Where my tutor gave me depth of knowledge into teaching practice, my peer gave me insight from an equal level of knowledge and understanding of the process. My peer, very kindly, broke down their review of my lesson into two areas:
- Moments of excellence
- Opportunities for improvement
This structure really gave me clear, thoughtful, and relative aims for my teaching. Through this, I have realised that there were common areas of improvement from my tutor and peer – specifically pace. This is something that I know I have needed to improve on, as I attended a public speaking workshop provided by UAL and this was a common topic of feedback for my presentation. I do wonder if my nerves kick in, and because I am conscious of time constraints I then quicken even further. This is definitely something I’ll be addressing through my planning and structuring of lessons going forward though.
Overall, I have found this extremely useful and am also bringing this exercise into my wider team to allow us to share our teaching practice at a more relative level.