Raising standards

Teaching is a complex process that links a series of techniques across lessons and across age ranges with the personal processes that individual teachers bring to the job. Many good teachers are unable to explain what they do because the skills and techniques that they use are part of themselves. This makes teaching a very personal process. Having said that, certain skills and techniques can be learned. This is important for teaching assistants, who have the opportunity to take on more of a ‘teaching’ role. If teaching assistants are expected to support the teacher, working alongside individuals and groups and, in some instances, with the whole class in order to reduce the teacher’s workload then their ‘teaching’ strategies have to be developed. If this doesn’t happen, they will find their work more difficult and raising standards will be less successful.

The sessions in this area suggest various teaching and learning processes that will work some of the time and with some pupils in some situations. The more skills and strategies that are developed, the better, because it will mean that each teaching assistant will have a wider repertoire to choose from until eventually there will hardly ever be a situation that arises that hasn’t been experienced before and that can’t be resolved by an effective, learned technique. It should be noted that the techniques developed in these sessions could be developed in greater depth with further training.