Gloucester College

Overview and Intro to Work Placement

Over the course of 2018-2019 academic year I am doing a work placement at Gloucester College, working within the English and Maths department in the Cheltenham campus. This has involved me learning different skills within Further Education for both GCSE and Function Skills classes. The English and Maths department in Gloucester College is designed to assist students who failed these exams in their GCSE years and thus have to retake alongside their other studies within the college. These studies are more hand-on practical work than would be available in a Sixth Form as part of A Levels, giving students the opportunity to learn things more direct to what they have interests in.

At the start of my time here I was primarily helping within English classes varying between the GCSE and Function Skills classes, learning the different ways to teach students with varying needs from their teachers and learning support. This has involved me working individually with students who are struggling and walking around during individual work to observe, assist and mark where necessary. By looking at both GCSE and Functional Skills classes, I have been able to observe the different teaching styles and course content that is available for Further Education in English.

As my work placement developed, I began to sit in a few Maths lessons to observe and assist in particularly large and loud lessons that are too difficult for just one teacher to deal with. This has involved me going through work with individual students who either struggle a lot or are rude and prove to be difficult to deal with alongside a large class. By working in Maths lessons as well as English, I have had to reteach myself a bit of Maths that showed to not be as challenging as I first assumed it may be.

Working with so many struggling students I have been able to develop my own understanding of the difficulties different students have to deal with during their studies. For example, working along a dyslexic student individually has allowed me to understand the individual assistance such students require. When working with this student, she often needs me to write up some work for her on purple paper as to limit the issues she has in regards to reading and understanding the work being set.

I have also had to work with a student individually to help him with work on commas; for example teaching him the correct ways to use them in a sentence and when not to use them. Prior to this lesson, this student had issues with when to use commas correctly, often ‘comma splicing’ rather than using them appropriately within his work. Not long after this lesson, this student had a writing exam and thanked me for the help I gave him, saying that it helped him to pass his work.

This placement has been able to not only help and develop my skills in regards to working with students, marking work and understanding individual needs, but has also helped to allow me to be more confident in a work place and public speaking. In the past, I have had issues with being able to talk to larger groups of people, something I have been working on for years, however working at the college, even just for these few months at first, I have developed my skills and become much more comfortable and confident with this.

Although I have not yet been at this placement for too long, I have been given the opportunity to work with classes as a cover when their teachers have been busy or ill. These classes have only been with a few students at a time, however I found it a lot less intimidating and worrying than I once assumed. During the English lesson I took over I was teaching a small class of girls about how to answer a writing question in an exam paper using ‘Birdsong’ as the past paper example to show them skills and how to answer the question. This included the use of PEE (Point, Evidence, Explain), looking through different response examples (one bad one good) and getting them to answer the question themselves.

As well as sitting in lessons, I have also done some admin work including some printing and laminating. Before the start of term, I helped a little with the enrolment processes for students, such as looking at past grades, talking to students about retakes and such. For this process I was more observing than anything else. I have also worked on the display board for the English corridor, made another display designed to encourage students to read and made a poster for a piece of work the students had to do included in the ‘Love Our Colleges’ week. I have also had to read articles related to Health and Social Care, Hair and Beauty, Fashion, Construction, Catering and Early years (the different subjects taught at the college) to write up some questions as practice revision for the students before their retake exams which I then had to type up as worksheets.

As I am still in the first term of my work placement at Gloucester College, I hope to learn and develop new skills involved with working with students in a Further Education environment between now and the end of the academic year.