MathsClass

Thinking about my 3rd year of teaching… 2008.

Mainly for my own record and future reflection, here are some ways I'd like to improve my teaching in 2008.

• Focus on my consistency is classroom language and behaviour management dealings (tone, consequences, escalations) — consistency, as you would expect, is something that I've seen in “expert” teachers
• I've always been a prolific collector of information to the point of overload, I need to sort through the bucket load of bookmarks, worksheets and books that I've amassed and filter out useful activities. Then, introduce these resources to my lessons. This is where my lesson prepartion time could be spent this year.
• Following on from the last point, in 2007 I started another web-site where I categorise online activities by topic (which I might mirror on this site one day). More than that, I find that many online activities might take 5-10 min for a student to complete - which makes using one a very inefficient use of time (once you get into the computer lab, login, fix all the computer problems... = headache). So, I'd actually like to find a couple of activities per topic to form mini lessons.
• One big problem at our school (confirmed by a survey of teachers in 2007) is students not having the necessary equipment (as bad as not having a pen and/or ruler). In the Maths faculty we lend equipment, because it saves on messing about at the start of the lesson. Thing is, as you'd expect, I don't get all the equipment I lend back. In my first 2 years, it was one of those things I sort of ignored, as I had enough things to worry about. Not sure that I have an answer for this problem in 2008.

So that's it for now. This list may see some additions in the first few weeks of term.