Teaching Placement 1: Ballyfermot Youthreach
Introduction and Learner Profile
Youthreach is a programme for early school leavers aged between 15 and 21. Youthreach aims to give young people the opportunity to discover options for their lives and gain certification. Ballyfermot youthreach is in a housing estate and next door to Ballyfermot Intreo centre. Most of the students had left secondary school, although some had left traditional schooling after primary school. There was a wide range of abilities in the class as well as newly diagnosed learning disabilities and literacy was varied. The centre offered a range of modules at level four which had the goal of every learner earning a level 4 major award in general learning. Learners were to be there for no more than 2 years. However, there were many who had been there for 3+ years, often leaving for long periods of time and then returning. The modules offered included maths, communications, workplace safety, information technology and cooking. All modules were mandatory and learners did not have a choice which ones they did.
Reflection
I learnt a lot about myself from being in this particular youthreach setting. Namely, I need to be somewhere with a clear structure and I need to know what’s expected of me and where I am to be and I need to feel welcome in an environment to flourish. The lack of both of these things were the main contributors to my decision to leave that placement and seek out a new one. There were many incidences that showed this but I will discuss only the most prominent below. Firstly, there was no clear timetable. Classes started and ended at different times each time I was there. The learners didn’t know where they were supposed to be and neither did the teachers. This resulted in me wandering at times trying to figure out where I was supposed to be. Secondly, there were no clear directions about what was expected of me. They had proposed that I teach history, which I did for a short time, but had not given me any sort of timeline for the course. They didn’t have a history curriculum themselves and had expected me to design it. In the meantime, I was supposed to be observing. However, several days they had me working in the front office while the secretary was out sick. Thirdly, there was no clear hierarchy. I was told different things by different people and then given out to by one of them for doing what the other said. I started to feel very isolated and alone.
The final straw came with the realisation that there was no one there that was going to support me. I had been asked to supervise the culinary skills class while there teacher was on leave. The person who put me there told me to do work experience skills with them, which I had never taught and there was no work left for them. While I was trying to find something for them to do, another of the teachers walked in and insisted we make lunch for the whole centre. There were two learners in with me, both were uninterested in making lunch because they had already been told they didn’t have to. So I ended up making lunch for 60 people, with one person helping and no real idea what I was doing. I’ll never forget how overwhelmed and stressed this made me feel. I asked several of the teachers for help only to be told they were ‘too busy’. I later found the majority of them hanging out in the staffroom drinking tea and chatting. The lunch never properly got made, the learners were unimpressed and the teachers blamed me. Looking back, I really believe it was an unreasonable task to give to an inexperienced student teacher who didn’t know what they were doing. At the time I felt I was afraid to say no to anything they asked and I think they knew that and took advantage. I started to feel like I could be drowning in front of them and none of them would do anything about it. Having a supportive and collaborative work environment has now become very important to me. You will see when I go on to discuss my other placements that both of those settings had that and I was very happy in both.
The actual teaching that I did in the Youthreach setting was informative and interesting. As they were all young people, I felt ‘keeping them busy’ was the ideal way to go. This, in essence, meant variety, lots and lots of variety. In order to keep the learners engaged and interested I embraces all sorts of different methodologies.. From observing their other classes I noticed they got bored quickly if they were just listening to someone talk or filling out worksheets. For the first class we started with making a group agreement. This agreement became a cornerstone for the 5 other classes that were taught there. We all agreed that phones were ok but not excessively and on silent, that one person was to talk at a time and that everyone was to be respectful of each others opinions. This worked out particularly well when someone was breaking one of these rules, they only had to be reminded of the agreement we all made and it came back together. This is a strategy I have used with every group I have started with since. The classroom is a democracy and learners’ voices are very important. I used a lot of PowerPoint in the Youthreach setting. I thought at the time that I could keep their attention better with visuals then just me talking. Obviously Powerpoint was not the whole class, but it did become the main way of imparting information with the subsequent activities becoming more about reinforcement of the information. Looking back, I would probably change this. I found that in other placements, I was over relying on it to put across the information. There were a lot of activities that could have been done to put across the information. It wasn’t necessary to give out all the information first. I have learnt from this and severely cut down on PowerPoint in classes, often using none at all. It has its time and its place, but it shouldn’t be used as the primary source of information, in my opinion.
Sample Lesson
This was one of the first history classes I taught in the Youthreach. The idea was to get learners used to a variety of terms that are used when you are analysing historical documents, such as bias, contradiction etc. The presentation in here was followed by an exercise where learners were given a newspaper article and asked to evaluate it.
The second part of the class centred around research and particular types of sources. The presentation described what primary and secondary sources are and gave some examples. It then went on to show different sources and ask the class as a whole if they thought they were primary or secondary. Although this class had some interaction and activity in it, it had an over reliance on PowerPoint and this is not something I repeated after leaving this placement.
Research Presentation.pptxAnalysing Historical Documents.pdf
Una Mullally_ Who influences the infuencers (Original).pdf
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