Pace #MonthlyWritingChallenge
"Even at a snail's pace you get ahead ..." by Klaus Wessel is licensed under 
CC BY 2.0
CC BY 2.0In the second week of October, I had a literacy lesson observation. It was bad timing because I was in the middle to a scheme of learning. We were publishing on the day the senior leadership team (SLT) wanted to come in. They couldn’t see me do that. It would make for a boring lesson. I had to think of something exciting, so I did.
“There's no advantage to hurrying through life." -Shikamaru Nara”
I jumped on to the TES Resources website, found a lesson that I could tweak and quickly cooked up an acceptable lesson that I felt happy to present for my observation. There were some nice bells and whistles in the lesson. I felt quite confident about delivering it. The day arrived – it was my P.E. day so I was in sports kit. Not good. Didn’t have my lucky shoes on. No matter, I had this. The lesson was good enough, or so I thought…
Only, it wasn’t. The SLT found fault in the stand alone lesson I had presented. The pace was lacking in certain parts and rushed in others. The objectives were not clear, I had not modelled correctly and critically, the team didn’t see the writing that the children produced. They had left by that point.
I received my feedback at lunchtime and I felt numb. Had I been twenty years younger, I would have been devastated by it but as an older teacher but new to the profession, I just let the criticism wash over me. The pace was all wrong. This was something that I would ruminated over later. Pace in my lessons is generally constant but, in this observation, I read quite a bit to the class. This is where I lost most of my momentum and my head teacher pointed this out. But I was not going to cry about this. I had sworn to myself years before that I was not going to cry about work ever again.
A few days later, I met with my headteacher and we went through how to structure lessons and she worked with me to come up with a series of literacy lessons that followed a flow building on previous work. It was a process that I needed to do and was grateful for the instruction. My colleagues often forget that although I have worked in education as a TA and HLTA, I’ve only been a teacher a couple of years and have not taught a whole academic year without interruption yet. So, my head teacher stepped in to support me and I had to let go feeling precious about my planning and open to new ways of looking at my lesson structure. She was coming back in seven days to watch me again.
Whilst going through all of this. I was reminded of how in early March 2020, I was at a near breaking point. It was my NQT year and I was creating all my planning, lessons and resources from scratch. I was getting into work at 7.30am, leaving at 6pm and working late, often until almost midnight. The pace of this workload was not sustainable. I didn’t know how much longer I could go on.
And then, Lockdown One happened and everything changed. The pace of life slowed down, not just for me but for everyone across the globe. It brought me back from the edge in more ways than one. When we all finally emerged from that time, we reflected on the pace of what we were doing before spring 2020 and how we would do things differently now. And for a while, things were different.
“Every flower blooms at a different pace.”
― Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
― Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
The morning that my head teacher was observing again arrived. I was anxious, nervous and doubting myself repeatedly. The lesson began and she walked in while I was part way through my input. I stumbled on my words. My mind went blank as I wrote a spelling on the interactive white board. Using my class to help me, I asked them to spell the word for me. In that instance, I’d managed to climb out of that hole! My teaching assistant kept giving me supportive glances to help me through and I completed the lesson. My head teacher left a feedback form on my desk.
At break time, I read her kind words. She was so supportive of all the changes I had put into the lesson responding to her feedback. Her note lifted a weight from my shoulders. I could take my foot off the peddle a bit and slow down. It is half term now and once again; the pace of my life is temporally shifting. We seem to be finding ourselves in a similar position to where we were in spring 2020 but will it take another Lockdown to change the pace of life again?
October 2021
