Week 8 - Professional Blog - 22/03/13

Five weeks, four classes, two tutor visits and 408 pupils later, Joanna and I have completed our school practice in Buganda Road Primary School. I can whole-heartedly say that having had the opportunity to teach in Uganda is an experience that I will never forget and one that has significantly helped me to develop as a teacher. 

Over the five weeks, Joanna and I have come across many challenges, some which we expected and others which we did not. The biggest challenge for me was the class size. Having so many children in a class puts extra pressure on the areas of behaviour management, assessment and differentiation. In terms of behaviour management and assessment (GTCNI, Competences 7, 24 and 25), I feel that the strategies that I introduced to the class were enjoyable for the children and the teachers also realised the benefit of these. Differentiation is an area which is vitally important as it “plays a major part in the quality of the education that each child receives” (Bearne, 2002, p.67) but is one of the areas that I could not completely master.  I did encourage the ‘Gifted and Talented’ students to participate in problem solving based activities and I tried to help those who were struggling on a one to one basis, however, having such a range of abilities and not even knowing half their names made this extremely difficult.

P2A - just 109 children.

Apart from these challenges I had a very enjoyable time teaching the Ugandan children in an interactive and challenging way (GTCNI, Competence 19). Seeing the enjoyment on their faces and hearing them laugh really made all the time spent making resources worthwhile. Each day I was in school I couldn’t help but think that these children truly deserved the best teaching as they were so eager to learn despite their unimaginable backgrounds.

Lovely, smiley children!

A typical lecture theatre.

Now that placement is over, Joanna and I have only four weeks of university left. Over the last 7 weeks we have got to know our classmates and lecturers, very well. We are in a PDGE class (the equivalent to a PGCE class) so all of our peers are a lot older than us. Despite of this, we have all become good friends. They are great at keeping us up to date on any changes and getting the class notes photocopied for us. The lectures themselves are very different to Northern Ireland. Joanna and I attend two modules, one on ‘Teaching and Delivery strategies’ and the other on ‘Sociology, History and Ethics in Education.’ The lectures take a discussion based format, where the lecturer’s notes are then dictated to us after the discussion. Due to the language barrier and the lecturer’s accents, I sometimes find it hard to follow but I have become accustomed to this over the last few weeks. 

Outside Makerere University.

I feel that I will have learnt a lot from attending Makerere University and participating in school practice in Buganda Road Primary School. Overall I think both of these experiences have helped me to “develop a knowledge and understanding of the need to take account of the significant features of pupil’s cultures, languages and faith and to address the implication for learning arising from these” (GTCNI, Competence 8).

References:

Bearne, E. (2002) Differentiation and Diversity in the Primary School, London, Taylor and Francis.

GTCNI (2010) Teaching: The Reflective Profession, Belfast.