But I Smile Anyway…

Linda’s SoSC prompt this week…

Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “pretty.” Use it any way you please. Enjoy!

You know what? It’s been a pretty mad week.

School has kept me even more busy than usual these last few days. It’s been Observation Central over here!

On Monday my co-teacher was being observed, so I had to be the supportive side-kick (as always!). And she did fantastically, as I expected, getting Good, with a side note about supportive colleagues!

On Tuesday, I was observing my line manager, but not in the context of judging her. We are piloting a new scheme in school, Lesson Study, where you are put into teams of three, and plan lessons, which then are observed, but you pick three pupils and predict their learning curve over the lesson, then see whether the intended learning outcomes were achieved. It’s a pretty tough thing to do, especially as no one really knew what they were doing! And the third member of our team was sick, so it was just me observing the other member of my team. Even more interesting as I was off sick last week in the meeting where they planned the whole lesson!

Wednesday was my turn to be observed… Last year both our observations were done as tandem ones, where we were observed together, working as a team. This year the Head Teacher decided that we needed to be observed individually. So… this was my first solo observation! I was bricking it, no lie! After doing my input for the session, we got going. On one side I had one assistant making cupcakes, with a group. On another, I had the other assistant doing a shape activity, and going on a shape hunt. We had a regular volunteer in too who was starting the process of creating dough decorations with the children… not so good to look at yet, but eventually they will be pretty ornaments for their parents to keep forever! My co-teacher pottered in the background so she didn’t interfere in my observation, but kept the stray kids busy making shape monsters! And I floated around, seeing which kids had recalled the shape names we were learning, and observing them in play.

I haven’t had the written feedback as yet, but the verbal feedback was pretty positive, so I can breathe a sigh of relief!

Happy Saturday!!!