Resource 1: Reflecting on your behaviour

Background information / subject knowledge for teacher

Using the questions below, think about your own behaviour as a teacher. Be honest in your answers. Are there examples from your classroom activities that support your ideas?

  • Are you a positive or a negative teacher in the way you treat your pupils? How could you be more positive?
  • Do you try to encourage them or discourage them? How? How can you encourage them more?
  • Do you make them happy when they are learning? How?
  • Do you ever make them sad, angry or scared? How?
  • What aspect of your teaching behaviour do you want to change? How can you do this?
  • What aspect of your pupils’ social behaviour would you like to change? How could you help them achieve this?

Sometimes it is not easy to answer these questions for ourselves and so it can be very useful to have a peer (fellow teacher) come and observe you teach. They can use the questions above to base their observations on and to give you feedback. The idea is to be supportive, not to try and knock you down! Your colleague can feed back your strengths and your weaknesses as a teacher and together you can discuss what sorts of things you need to do to improve your teaching. Ideally, you will then go and do the same thing for your colleague.

To begin with this way of working can be difficult, as we often don’t like others to be in our classroom watching us teach, but it is a very powerful way to help each other and share ideas.

Tell your head teacher what you are doing and keep him informed of your progress. He will probably be very interested and will support you. Share your ideas with other teachers in a staff meeting.

3. Creating a caring environment

Resource 2: Mrs Ameyaw’s reflections on her approach