Welcome to the course.

I am the subject co-ordinator for English and, with the assistant subject co-ordinator Barbara Imrie and with Drama subject co-ordinator Kate Brockbank, I will be responsible for running the Thursday afternoon sessions where all the English trainees on the course meet.

Barbara and I also act as personal tutors to you all and will try our best to resolve any problems you have with any aspect of the course.

You can ring me at St Peter’s High School, Gloucester, where I am an assistant head on 01452 520594. There is also a fax number: 01452 509209. At home my number is 01453 750697 and you can leave messages there if my daughter is telling her friends all about whatever it is.

Ideally, though, you will contact me by email: my address is: <philip@yewtreecottages.fsnet.co.uk>.
Barbara Imrie is the assistant English subject co-ordinator. She will contribute to some of the Thursday afternoon sessions, but her chief role will be to monitor your progress by visiting you in your schools. I do not have her contact details to hand, so I am leaving a space here for you to write them in in due course.





Kate Brockbank, of Cirencester Deer Park School, will run the Drama sessions. You can contact her at home on 01453 765906 or at the school on 01285 653447 or,best, by e-mail : <vitoandkate@brockalone.freeserve.co.uk>.

This booklet gives the times, dates, locations and content outline for each session. Most sessions are held on Thursday afternoons in College (Francis Close Hall) from 14.15 until 17.15.

However, some are on Thursday mornings and the start times of some sessions are different from the norm. A significant minority are held either at St Peter’s High School, Gloucester or at Cirencester Deer Park; we may also organise trips away from College.

Most sessions are led by me, but the ten drama sessions are led by Kate Brockbank. Sue Goble, of St Peter’s, will give the lead session on Special Educational Needs. Barbara will also contribute. I hope this will give you a welcome variety of approaches and teaching styles!

The Thursday afternoon sessions are compulsory. Please let me know if I create problems for you in my management of them. Staying away becomes a problem for everyone!

During the year I shall bore you rigid telling about just how useful our website is and how much more useful it’s going to be:
<http://webspace.dialnet.com/gitep-eng/index.htm>

Philip Rush

English

The first module focuses on the individual lesson. I use a lot of poetry here as I think if you can teach poetry, you can teach anything, and secondly, because poems offer opportunities to construct tightly focused individual lessons as well as longer small units of work lasting perhaps for a week or two.

This year, for the first time, there will be detailed and explicit work on the national literacy strategy. This will include work on the ‘literacy progress units’.

In the second module, we move on to look at the importance of progression and of a coherent scheme of work. In order to do this we will focus on a number of typical texts. I’d like you all to have copies of these texts, and at the beginning of the booklet you will find a list of books to buy. This is as short a list as I can make it. every one of these books will be useful to you in your career. This is, I assure you, money well spent.

The final group of sessions is designed with your first job in mind. We need to move on to more sophisticated thinking about English teaching and to looking at broader issues.

Throughout nearly all of these sessions, you will be working at your parent school, and you should be able to draw links between the Thursday material and your own observations, teaching and mentor discussions. Please make sure that you do integrate the ‘theory’ of Thursday afternoons with the ‘practice’ of the rest of the week. Try perhaps to discuss the content of the previous week’s subject session and the agenda for the next with your mentor at your weekly meeting.

Assessment of this part of the course is by a series of six coursework pieces and by a final, longer, presentation and assignment. There is also an ICT portfolio, to meet the requirements in that area, to which you will make an important contribution from your work in English.

The first of these assignments will address the area of subject knowledge. This will be explained at the first session and your piece will become the report for that session, along with an ‘action plan’ to help you record progress in subject knowledge.

The remainder of your coursework will consist of session reports. Each of you will report on four sessions - in some cases, you will concentrate on just one section of a session, to make the numbers work out! The report should include three elements: firstly, a concise but accurate record of the content of the session. (Each session addresses a discrete part of the ITT national curriculum for English, so by providing a report on each session we are providing evidence that we have covered these areas.) Secondly, you need to add some reference to theory. (This can be a tricky area. I have improved the booklists this year, and have spent a grant received from the partnership in buying reference texts. These will be made available, as appropriate, during the year to you when you write up a session. I am very keen to improve the references to theory in the session reports this year.) Thirdly, you must add some reflection in your own practice, perhaps from your observation of lessons, or perhaps from your teaching.

This is asking a lot of 500 words! Of course, you may feel more comfortable going beyond this in order to make a useful record. All session reports will be photocopied for the group and made available on the website. You ought to down-load these and keep them in your PDP in the section focusing on your main subject.

Each of the six coursework pieces should provide evidence that you are meeting the standards for the award of QTS. Therefore they will form a part of your final PDP.

I should like you to create small portfolios from each session report in collaboration with your mentor. Each week you will be given a short task to help you prepare for the following session; this may be some reading, or it may be to undertake some very limited research into how your school tackles certain issues in the English department. (By discussing the session reports with your mentor you are helping to reinforce the important link between the Thursday afternoon sessions and the school placement.) You need to add to the session report (and remember, most of the time the session report will have been written by someone else) a record of a conversation with your mentor on this topic, and a reflection of your own practice which relates to the topic of the session.

At the end of the course, you should have forty such ‘portfolios’. These will provide you with a record of the work you have done which will help you in your first years of teaching. In this way we can collaboratively produce a reflective handbook to English teaching. You will be surprised to find just how useful this will be!

All the work has to be word processed. You should email your reports to me on <philip@yewtreecottages.fsnet.co.uk.> taking care to keep a copy. I should like Microsoft Word or Claris/AppleWorks documents please, as attachments to the email. Please head your reports with the date, your name and the session number. Please also use name and number as the subject of the email.

Using ICT in this way contributes, of course, to your ICT portfolio.

The final assignment is supposed to provide an opportunity for you to be ‘innovative’ in a proposal of a policy or a scheme of work for your main school English department. You present a seminar paper on this topic to the rest of the group at a final session, and hand in a 1,500 word report to me. Your talk should not repeat what is in the paper, but should focus on your rationale, your research and our thinking, and the report should represent the fruits of these labours. Your main school English department should also be given a copy of your report.

Again, all this will be made clear as the summer approaches. Don’t worry.

The ICT portfolio is essential, and the exact nature of the English contribution to it will be discussed at an early session, as you will see below.

Maintaining your PDP and your mentor assessment sheets is essential and I will try to see two or three each week while we take a break during the three hour session.