4. A Professional Autobiography

This is obviously one of the most personal parts of this module the most challenging. To sit and critically reflect on how events that have occurred in your career have impacted your decisions to under take this enquiry. My enquiry is on developing greater parental involvement, fortunately as many teachers – I can think of hundreds of stories about different mums and dads and how their child’s education has benefited (or not) from how their parents have engaged with the school. I think personally this is also where my own interest comes in and as such it has always been one of my educational priorities with the children I work with, to try and enthuse their parents as well as the child. I have lost count of the amount of parent – teacher meeting I have had where I have said to parents, “Its like a triangle, the school, the child and you, and it only works if all three sides put the effort in”. Interestingly enough, this was a strange concept in a private school I worked in, where some parents saw it as merely a relationship between the school and the child, based on the fact that hey had paid such high fees – that they could almost ‘opt out’ of their part of the deal, likewise there were also the parents who wanted to get too involved and also those split families, which made the triangle a square…

I am committed to children’s learning and realise the importance that education brings to their future life opportunities, regardless of academic ability. I believe it is our job to mould them into life-long learners.

Throughout my career the nagging reoccurrence of boys’ underachievement has always been there. I have three children myself, two of which are boys. Both underachieved in different ways in the education system. They now read have travelled the world and hold down good jobs. But…….. I blame myself for not having the knowledge, skills, time etc to aid, motivate, and influence them. I studied later I life and was studying for my degree and working two jobs as well as bringing up my three children alone.

I worked on projects with Turkish boys as part of the “learning to learn” project with Newcastle University and with Edmonton Action Zone to motivate black boys. I believe motivation is the key and have seen the proof over and over again with teachers turning around a poor work ethos into a positive learning environment with motivated boys as learners. Equipping parents with the tools and knowledge is the other ingredient. Had I known what I know now - I wonder if I would have stayed in the bank or if I would have studied to become a teacher?

……..Or what my children could have achieved if I had studied to be a teacher before they were born!

I developed an interest in special needs, especially low-level attainment and how to teach a language to students of that calibre.

I was helped by teaching assistants in the classes, but they were for specific students. I did devise ways of helping pupils. For example, for pupils with low reading ability, I would help them to visualise difficult words and remember how they were pronounced by making them think of an item that sounded like the word they were trying to remember.

cat horse = Quatorze (14) French.

Van – vingt (20) French.

These were very helpful to the students and enabled them to remember the words.
Teaching a language to students who struggled with reading and writing in English was a challenge. However, I am now aware that some of the skills they pick up when learning a foreign language are helpful to them anyway (repetition, some phonetics).

I think that this is one of the most important sections and I am glad that this is included. I feel that my work and life experience to date plays a big part in my role as a researcher and am looking forward to getting this down on paper. It means that although we as researchers try and be as objective as possible, there is little point in denying that there will be influences on our viewpoints.

I am focusing upon developing a 'talking classroom' where students effectively communicate, interact and listen to each other to promote their learning. I want stduents to work together cooperatively to learn.
As a more experienced teacher now I feel that we should not be getting stduents to be quiet to learn but we should be encouraging them to communicate more in class and talk and listen. There are students in the group who have speech Language and communication needs and the challenge will be to get them to talk more, to get some stduents to monitor their input as well as improving the group's attainment.
I feel there should be mroe emphasis upon communication within learning in Secondary school. I always feel concerned about the level and data driven culture that we live in. These judgements are often more about the school than the stduent. There is a blanket judgement made that stduents should make two levels progress at KS3. Is this right? Is every stduent able to do this and is this a good judgement of every stduents' progress.
I also feel that sometimes as an SEN teacher we have a basic knowledge of many specific difficulties but we are not an expert in any specific difficulties. So I want to improve my understanding SLCN and use my improved knowledge to improve my own teaching in Maths.

Peta Griffiths

Thanks for the responses. Read and think about how experiences have led to belifes and values that may bias the research process. Each researcher is not starting off as an blank sheet making objective choices of focus, question, procedures ect but constantly shaping their choices in the light of their experience, belifes and values.


To what extent does expression of exprrinces belifes and values enhance the quality of the research and free it from subjectivity?

My experience of the personalised curriculum has been that the children have been able to access a wider range of performing arts opportunities. I believe that the staff team now engage more in dialogue with their collegues about the effectiveness of the individual curriculum and make minor adjustments in between the larger review periods where major changes are made. By having a more flexible curriculum some children can access more than one class per week where as others attend on an adhoc basis. The development of our annual Christmas concert into an inclusive performance, has engaged the whole school community in the potential of the performing arts as a focal point for inclusion. I have been out of the MA loop for a few weeks as I have been working on this project, I would like to share it with you but need to check for permissions first. In the last few weeks the two children I plan to use as my case studies for action enquiry have both surpassed expectations. "O" is rigid in his thinking and needs visual cues to support any transition. In the last year I have been using this as a strength to begin to teach him the piano. Gradually with collaboration from his teacher we have extended the duration he will tolerate learning (using an electronic timer) he has learnt and applied musical notation (crotchets minims etc). He has transfered this learning into a new location ( the hall for the performance) and performed twice in one day to a total audience of 200 people. When I began to work with "O" 6 years ago I didn't know some of these strategies and was at the recieving end of some challenging behaviour. I found it difficult to know how to engage him in constructive learning. Through the development of personalised curriculum the staff working with him use a more joined up approach to supporting his needs.
From this story I can see that I believe that PLUSS has been a good thing. That I value team work and the ongoing reflection on suitability of individual programmes.

I can see that I need to be aware of my personal bias. My research project will expose my work strategies and it would be tempting to paint them in a rosy fashion. However in order to improve my work it needs to be objective and give scope for improvement. I answer to Ian's question above, I think that the expression of experiences beliefs and values lays a contextual foundation for the study but it will be the reflections and analysis of them following a period of exploration that will show the real objectivity. My hunch already is that I am not "in the loop" as much as I would like to be because I work part time for the school and I am a freelance specialist. This too is an advantage though as I am able to compare different schools and systems, and also to focus on the discipline of specialism. I hope that this research will improve my work by being linked more effectively to the whole curriculum and also meet further needs of inclusion within the school community.

Morag

My experience of the personalised curriculum has been that the children have been able to access a wider range of performing arts opportunities. I believe that the staff team now engage more in dialogue with their collegues about the effectiveness of the individual curriculum and make minor adjustments in between the larger review periods where major changes are made. By having a more flexible curriculum some children can access more than one class per week where as others attend on an adhoc basis. The development of our annual Christmas concert into an inclusive performance, has engaged the whole school community in the potential of the performing arts as a focal point for inclusion. I have been out of the MA loop for a few weeks as I have been working on this project, I would like to share it with you but need to check for permissions first. In the last few weeks the two children I plan to use as my case studies for action enquiry have both surpassed expectations. "O" is rigid in his thinking and needs visual cues to support any transition. In the last year I have been using this as a strength to begin to teach him the piano. Gradually with collaboration from his teacher we have extended the duration he will tolerate learning (using an electronic timer) he has learnt and applied musical notation (crotchets minims etc). He has transfered this learning into a new location ( the hall for the performance) and performed twice in one day to a total audience of 200 people. When I began to work with "O" 6 years ago I didn't know some of these strategies and was at the recieving end of some challenging behaviour. I found it difficult to know how to engage him in constructive learning. Through the development of personalised curriculum the staff working with him use a more joined up approach to supporting his needs.
From this story I can see that I believe that PLUSS has been a good thing. That I value team work and the ongoing reflection on suitability of individual programmes.

I can see that I need to be aware of my personal bias. My research project will expose my work strategies and it would be tempting to paint them in a rosy fashion. However in order to improve my work it needs to be objective and give scope for improvement. I answer to Ian's question above, I think that the expression of experiences beliefs and values lays a contextual foundation for the study but it will be the reflections and analysis of them following a period of exploration that will show the real objectivity. My hunch already is that I am not "in the loop" as much as I would like to be because I work part time for the school and I am a freelance specialist. This too is an advantage though as I am able to compare different schools and systems, and also to focus on the discipline of specialism. I hope that this research will improve my work by being linked more effectively to the whole curriculum and also meet further needs of inclusion within the school community.

Morag

As a teaching assistant I have supported a number of students, each having different needs. But since I started my career I have always been trying to find an explanation for the fact that during every final year of the primary education there are a small group of children who still cannot read.

My interest in learning difficulties (in general) grew stronger over the years. I believe that the initial primary years (years 1, 2 and 3 - ages 6 to 8)are fundamental for acquiring literacy skills. Therefore we must emphasise on literacy skills during these years using different approaches such as multisensory teaching, in order to cater for the different needs of children.

Moreover, I believe that teachers need to be constantly informed on how to approach children with literacy difficulties.

The focus of my enquiry, Emotional Intelligence, came from a committed interest in helping pupils with specific learning difficulties achieve more. I see boys and staff become frustrated when a situation gets out of control and cannot be repaired due to behaviour. Every day I speak with the boys, especially the ADHD and ASD boys, who have ‘had a bad day’ because ‘something went wrong’. I want help them to verbalise and identify what a ‘bad day’ is and what that ‘something’ is and how it happened. I have noticed that the boys I work with find it so hard to talk about their emotions and just use words such as ‘angry’, or ‘cross’, and sometimes the adults around them do the same.

I believe that if we can stop the spiraling out of control and give pupils and adults the language to be able to talk about what actually happened and why, the behaviour may change and lessons may run more smoothly. More learning is achieved and behaviour improves and so the cycle goes on!

So do your experiences bias your work as a researcher and hould you be explicit about this?

Yes I am sure that I am biased and so should be explicit about it! This is the point where I start to get lost and worry about where my research focus should come from. I have a tendency to be too broad and get lost!

Snowed in and with a broken ankle from the school ski trip!

So now we have some accounts:

Should you come clean and show your professional experiences and beliefs and values that you have formed?


How important is this section to establsihing the quality of the research?

Is research in education "objective" or "subjective"?

When I started teaching EFL in mainstream schools was the first time I had pupils with dyslexia and I have to admit that I was incapable of providing adequate help to them. There were times that dyslexia was used by some of the pupils as an excuse to avoid getting envolved in tasks dealing with language learning, not to mention a foreign language. So through this project I want to investigate ways according to which I can make those pupils participate in classroom language activities and become active in the process of learning. Having attended several seminars regarding SEN, to my dissapointment, I didn't get straight answers regarding teaching EFL to pupils with learning difficulties. Most of the answers were assumptions deriving from L1 acquisition. For this reason in this project I would like to investigate which methods and how can be combined so as to have a better result in L2 writing and spelling, as I do believe that those pupils can get better in second language acquisition. Another bias of mine is that I believe that those pupils are a bit negative and not willing to learn a second language as they probably had enough troubles with the first one, so consequently their parents do not provide any motives to them to participate in the subject of foreign languages. Through this I hope to gain valuable knowledge that will be of help to me in the future so as to provide better quality teaching to those pupils.

Hi Everybody,

I hope nobody minds if I talk on your converstation, as unlike yourselves nobody seems to have the need to talk on mine - dissertation 09.

I am questioning how to embed wave 3 intervention into the triangle partnership (parent/child/school)? I believe that children with SpLD have the right to have taught strategies to scaffold their learning development and their ability to express themselves, and not just survival in dyslexic friendly classrooms. In my school this link is not seen as important especially since the integrated curriculum was introduced in Sept 09. I know that I am biased, but I also value both sides of the fence: the importance of inclusion - of belonging to the class. But also the importance of receiving one to one from myself (Specialist Dyslexic Teacher). Being dyslexic myself I know that it is more than just survival skills that are needed for life long learning, but independence!

My literature research has shown that the parents-school link has been well researched. There is also much research on the child as a learner, but how the child fits in as a partner in their own learning is very thin. Ian suggested that children are forced into education and therefore can not be equal in a partnership. I have seen and heard from parents that some children do not take responsibility for their learning, (doing homework, using resources around them, asking for help) especially those that have more difficulty to learn (SEN). I believe that this ia a gap that I hope to produce a new model where children are empowered by embedding their own intervention into the partnership. The problem I currently have is how to measure this - is it someting I can get off the shelf or should it stem from my model?

I know that my research will be influenced by my experience and views and will therefore make my analysis subjective. I will be looking for evidence to support my question and hypothesis. But by being open I hope will enable me to accept that, and more on. However I will also build into my methods - triangulation of data collection (from teacher/parent/child/ passive on looker) to ensure that I see things from different perspectives.

I am taking up Sarah my tutor suggestion 'Blobs', which are flexible on what they can measure.

Still snowed in!