I would love to challenge the people who come up with the plan for a PGCE to practice what they preach and complete a whole year of being a trainee on their course.
It has been getting silly for some time but the next two weeks just seem to have tipped over the edge to stupid.
It is not the hard work I am complaining about but the logical thought in how it is set up.
There is 11 school days before, as a course, we break up for our reading week, followed by Christmas. Two of these are reading days and one is my final TP day and one is a review day leaving seven days. In these seven days I need to spend five in the alternate Key Stage, leaving two in my home class, which again seems fine. That is until they decided to cram three more observed lessons into these two days (which are split throughout the two weeks). So what that means is I will be going into the class, effectively clueless about how each lesson fits into what they have been doing and it will be so hard to follow their learning on lesson by lesson.
So I ask why the need for these three more observed lessons, they are hardly going to improve the teaching when they are scattered about so badly.
Also add on top of this an assignment that is 'conveniently' due in before our reading week and the timetable simply looks bizarre.
If a lecturer is reading this, please give me a reason to put me out of my misery as to why it is a good idea to structure it like this.
Because to me the logical thing would be to extend TP1 or include more observed lessons during TP1, have a full week, or two weeks in Key Stage 1 and have the assignment hand in AFTER the reading week!
If it's any consolation, parts of the PGCE I'm doing seem to be as poorly thought through as yours. There have been some great things about our course - in particular, a couple of really inspiring tutors, and much of the experience of being on placement - but a lot of the 'academic' side is extremely problematic, both in terms of the tasks themselves, and how their timings impact on other areas of the course.
ReplyDeleteFor example, we have an ongoing series of written tasks which I'm now convinced are pretty much impossible to do to a high standard, as the criteria set out, the restrictions imposed, and the nature of the task itself are simply incompatible. What I had previously been looking forward to as an opportunity seriously to engage with the literature, etc, has now become a fairly hollow exercise in jumping through hoops, producing mediocre work that ticks the boxes as well as possible, but never adds up to very much. It's all rather deflating, and extremely time-consuming - often at times when we're already up to our eyes with other work.
The irony, as I think you imply, is that the decisions to do things this way were taken by apparent experts in the field of education - people who teach others on the subject. Like you, I'd love to see how some would get on on the programme they themselves have designed.
Good luck with the next couple of weeks, and thanks for blogging. Christmas is just around the corner...