Reflection: Education and Students Essay

Submitted By contactakaur
Words: 1487
Pages: 6

Assignment 102: Session Plan and Teaching
Aims:

To identify and describe the required content and outcome of a learning programme. To analyse appropriate teaching and learning strategies and techniques to meet required outcomes.

Outcomes:

Write learning objectives appropriate to a teaching session. Produce session plans that clearly identify what learning will take place. Demonstrate the ability to structure learning in such a way that it is likely to foster and maximise students’ interest, participation, enthusiasm and motivation to achieve. Utilise external and internal networks and contacts to enhance and broaden the programme delivery to meet the needs of learners.

Explore the challenges of curriculum design within a specific subject area.
I currently teach one “module” (or “unit”) of an “Advanced Vocational Certificate of Education” (AVCE) course in “Information and Communication Technology”. The course as a whole covers a broad range of business uses for information and communication technology, including word-processing, spreadsheets, graphic and web page design, databases and so on. The module I teach is unit 6, entitled “Database Design (Advanced)” and covers the use of relational features of databases, with particular attention to the popular Microsoft Access software.
An external body, “Edexcel” (http://www.edexcel.org.uk/) lays down the syllabus for both the course as a whole, and each of the modules. An excerpt from the complete course book is included here as appendix A. The individual modules of the course are arranged in a sequence by a team of teachers (Minton 1997, p249) in an attempt to balance mandatory and optional units, practical and creative work, etc. The students may obtain a partial award on completion of one year of the course, but the full AVCE qualification requires two years. The module I teach is positioned in the second semester of the first year of the course. Alongside my lessons, the students are also taking courses in graphic design, application of number and core IT skills.
Of particular relevance is the link between my unit and the spreadsheet unit (Unit 3) taught in the first semester. Database and spreadsheets share many similarities, and can be used to address many of the same problems. Referring back to what the students learned from the spreadsheet unit while teaching the database unit can provide a useful way to provide context and reinforce prior learning. (Curzon, 1997, p278). To a lesser degree, mentioning the database unit during the spreadsheet unit might also be helpful.
Prepare a course outline for 20 hours of teaching. This must include an individual learning program to meet a particular individual’s needs.
I have prepared a scheme of work (appendix B) and some accompanying lesson plans (appendix C) covering the recommended 20 hours of teaching. One of my students was unable to attend due to illness for about five weeks (ten sessions) of the course, so I also include an alternative scheme of work for this student. The alternative scheme includes deferred assessment dates and reference to online material for the student to study while at home and during the Easter break.
Each week I teach two classes of around 20 students each for two, two-hour sessions. So each group has four hours of teaching each week, and I teach a total of eight hour a week. Both classes are taking an identical course, but are split for classroom management and resource reasons. There is also a third group taking a similar course, but with different teachers. This third group is taught from the same syllabus but using a slightly different scheme of work.
A scheme of work may be defined as a series of planned learning experiences sequenced to achieve the course aims in the most effective way (Reece and Walker, 2000, p324). For this scheme of work I use an informal technique similar to TPD (Topic Precedent Diagrams) as discussed in Reece and Walker (2000)