Weekly Lesson Evaluations

1. Weekly Lesson Evaluations prompt sheet
Week beginning: 23rd
–
27th
May
Targets from last evaluations:
 Continue with ‘games’ which can
invigorate students
Reflective Practice: how successful were the lessons?
Year 7
24th
May 2016 – Monologues
This lesson focused on monologues and to be able to write a monologue in
the role of Katniss. I felt that this activity was enjoyable as they were able to
stand up and present themselves, showing off their speaking and listening
ability to the students. One thing that was problematic was the difference
between a monologue in a play and a movie. I felt I ran into problems when I
showed a monologue from the Pursuit of Happiness and they were confused
as they thought a monologue was only to be specific to an audience. In the
future, I need to stick to monologues on stage rather than in a movie.
25th
May 2016 – Assessment Debriefing
This lesson was formally observed by Huw, my mentor at school. I focused on
assessment feedback – SPAG. Overall, Huw was happy with the lesson, but I
was in an extreme panic beforehand as I had lost the materials that I was
going to use for collaborative learning. It was extremely worrying, and
perplexing but I had to improvise. I felt I kept calm under pressure and the
lesson went better than expected. Huw did say that the lesson was too SPAG
heavy and this could have been countered by praising students for their
assessments and even using the visualizer to show off work. I feel this is
important, and one of the biggest things that I would take out of that lesson –
in feedback lessons, I seem to focus on the ‘even better ifs’, but I should try
and balance it out, as well as motivate students. Francis has spoken about
this before, where praise is extremely important and this has to be utilized in
feedback sessions.
Year 8
23rd
May 2016 – Assessment Preparation
Students prepared for assessment on the question ‘who is to blame for the
tragedy?’ This lesson helped students plan for their assessment, where they
ranked who they thought was to blame for the tragedy and giving reasons
why. Thereafter, students drew a table with the character, why they are to
blame and quotes to support this claim. I felt the table worked particularly well
as this allowed them to express their opinions, and supporting those with
quotes. I also helped students by giving them scenes to focus on for each
character, which I felt was appropriate scaffolding.
26th
May 2016 – Assessment
Students wrote their assessment ‘who is to blame for the tragedy?’. The
lesson went without any problems. Beforehand, I gave them a sample PEE
paragraph and asked students why it hit the ‘level 8’ assessment criteria. This
model would show what I expect in their PEE paragraphs, as well as reminder

2. how to structure a PEE paragraph.
Year 9
23rd
May 2016 – Act Three
This lesson focused on reading through Act Three and having some
explorative discussion which will aid them for their assessment. The students
really enjoyed reading through the play, where characters were assigned to a
student, and were engaged. I felt the discussion also went well, where we
spoke about who they would blame most for the death of Eva Smith. One
improvement could have been to get students to write a paragraph in their
books about who they thought was to blame for the death of Eva Smith and
why, so that they will already have a paragraph which can be used and
extracted when planning their assessment.
24th
May 2016 – Preparing for Assessment
This lesson focused on preparing for assessment. I felt that they worked well,
but my instructions could have been clearer when explaining what to do in a
carousel and taking notes down. To make it clearer, this could be shown on a
PPT slide, or break down my instructions so that the students can do this in
steps. I also felt that all the students did not always have a constant reminder
about the question, which has led to some students doing worse than their
previous assessment. To combat this, I would possibly write up the question
in the corner of the board so that they have a constant reminder. Overall, I felt
that the lesson where I used collaborative learning and carousel work really
helped students share their ideas together and note down any quotes which
they could explain in detail.
Year 10
26th
May 2016 – Speeches lesson
In this lesson, I focused on speeches and the features of a persuasive
speech. This entailed looking at Emma Watson’s ‘HeForShe’ speech at the
UN Conference, where she spoke about women’s equality. I felt that the video
of Emma Watson’s speech was engaging, and that they were able to produce
openings to their speech that were similar to hers, as well as implementing
the features that they have been taught throughout KS3. In this year 10 class,
I have found it hard to get some students to stop talking and the low-level
disruption was evident in this lesson. I feel that this can be improved when I
have my own classes and have my own authority with them. Some of the
performances given were extremely powerful, and showed the students how
powerful some of the techniques used actually were.
Action Points:
 Assert authority when needed
 Balance positivity with ‘even better ifs’ in feedback lessons