Sunday 1 October 2017

Flexible workshops



This term I decided to change up the learning groups and instead create needs based workshops. The reason why I made this change was because the learning groups were too big (with a large class size, we reached up to 8-9 people in each group). It became too difficult for students to share their thoughts with each other in the large groups, let alone hear me while I was teaching. The range of abilities in the groups had also changed a lot over the year. Students were varying too much in the stages that they were working at, so, it was time to mix it up!

Each week, the workshops changed - it has been very flexible. For example, if the focus that week was fractions, I would group up students based on the stages they were currently working at. My class also enjoyed this because it gave them to opportunity to work with people that they didn't usually get to work with. The current workshops are now smaller than the learning groups that I had in the beginning of the year. The one issue with this, is that it means I have more groups to see, which can make it difficult to see each group enough in the week. I will be working on this next term as I need fair time with each group!