Rahana Khanom

The pleasure of watching a child develop and improve their skills throughout the year is very satisfying and rewarding; this is one of the main reasons why I would welcome the opportunity to give something back to the pupils. I have always contributed actively to the ethos of a school where I promote effective and high standards learning. I understand the importance of setting targets, questioning students, recording observations, and most importantly allowing students to assess themselves and each other, undertaking an active role in their learning. I implement school behavioural policies from the beginning of every lesson, where I explicitly communicate my high expectations of them and learning objectives and if they do not fulfil these expectations there will be consequences from phone calls or letters to parents and guardians and detentions.
 
Undoubtedly the most challenging aspect to teaching is ensuring that all students are progressing in learning. I believe it is important to create a student-led classroom to allow students to have control of their learning through group work, independent tasks, and variety of different activities such as debates, recapping prior knowledge through images and building understanding through topic related booklets. I have integrated a variety of teaching methods such as mixed ability grouping of individuals to facilitate high ability students and aiding the low ability students. I am able to effectively differentiate lessons in order to accommodate the needs of mixed ability classes with low ability, pupil premium, EAL, SEND and higher ability learners together in one room. One example of this is when I taught ‘Nazi Policies towards Women’ to Year 9 low ability students. I encouraged students to explore historical sources freely without following the usual writing format of content, author, and purpose. Students were successfully able to transfer their ideas on to paper and discover what policies women had to follow during the Nazi period. Through this activity it allowed me to develop a new strategy to plan lessons effectively and support low ability students to understand what a source is and promote high standards of learning, which has become one of my strengths over the course of my teaching years.