September's goals

So September is nearly here, and the summer holiday seems much shorter than it did in June.  I'm already getting emails on the start of term meetings and it's time to start making plans.

I really like the beginning of the school year, it's lovely to see the old staff and students returning and I always get excited about meeting new classes.  I feel hopeful about making a fresh start.  

Even more exciting this year my department has been chosen to trial the use of ipads in the classroom.  I went to school last week and we have a new 60" flatscreen where our whiteboard used to be.  Going to be a bit of a change, but a good one I hope.

I'm normally pretty good at coming up with ideas but less good at maintaining them throughout the rest of the year, hopefully this year my blog will help me to keep up my energy.

So plans for September - get to know my students!

I've already added new questions to my start of term questionnaire, it still has the normal - "how much science have you studied before?" bog standard questions, but I've also added others like "what was the most exciting thing that happened to you last year?" and "if you could make me read any book what would it be?"  I'm hoping that it will make the exercise a little more interesting and give me new insights about my new classes.  With my old classes I plan on spending part of the first lesson feeding back about their summer.

I'm also going to try and learn all of my students names in the first class, by the end of the first 50 minutes I would like to say goodbye to them all by name, and then welcome by name at the beginning of the first class.

A fellow teacher gave me a nice exercise which I might try.  She asks students to discuss in pairs an object that is important to them.  Then either the student whose object it is, or the other student in the pair reports back to the class.  She says it helps her to gauge some of the personalities in her class, and it's a little more interesting than asking them the usual questions of "what did you get in your GCSE's?"

So here goes, September is nearly here, my dissertation on academic risk taking is nearly finished (blog report to follow) and I still have marking to do.  Bring on the new term!