The PGCE I am on is a placement based course with a planned 8 months out of 9 being in schools. We do have university and specialist training days interjected but for the most part we are learning on the job!
So, the big question I’ve been asked by lots of people is, how am I able to complete a practice based course from home?
My university is trying to be more eco friendly anyway and becoming paperless is a key element of this. So, this has improved the transition from university – home because, for example, you can access most of the library online already and we use blackboard for work and presentation access which is used by many UK universities too.
To make sure we are the best teachers we can be upon graduating we have to get a grade of good or outstanding in each of the Government’s Teaching Standards which then gives us an overall grade. Working from home, my university has now laid out a document with tasks in to meet these standards. Our job is to complete as many as we can before our final point of review – in around month!
Some of the activities are supported by online courses or have led my friends and I to finding ones. So, I thought I’d include some in this post so that you can have a go at completing them. They’re really helpful as a trainee teacher but they’re also helpful in many other ways, you may be or know someone with SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disability) or want to improve your knowledge of our education system.
I’ve picked three so far and will upload more if I find them helpful:
- Bath University are running a fantastic course called Good Practice in Autism Education. My university explained this was 12 hours long but if you’re a slow reader like me it takes a lot longer, it’s meant to be spread over 4 weeks.
- The Open University are providing an online course called Understanding Dyslexia. This has been explained as being 20 hours worth of study to us but again, see how you find it.
- Finally, a course has been recommended to me by a friend called Introducing Assessment for Learning, otherwise known as AfL. Assessment is a tricky element to understand when being asked to WFH because this is a pivotal time, with reports being written and SATs that would have been coming round the corner it would’ve been ideal to be observing your training mentor/ class teacher. To have a course like this accessible online is a great tool to access some more assessment knowledge.
*Disclaimer* This is not an advert for any of the course websites or organisations. I have just found them really useful. Also, my university is creating online certificates to acknowledge us studying on some of these courses provided by others because you have to pay for the certificate at the end otherwise so either be prepared to pay for the certificate or try and arrange the same system at your place of learning.
Blonde-Hygge 