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Concourse 2

Delta: meeting the teaching criteria | Section 6

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sensitivity
engagement
varying your role
listening and responding

The criteria explained

criteria6

Group dynamics

The criteria under section 6 refer to your relationship with your learners.  They are headed:
Creating and maintaining an atmosphere conducive to learning
To meet these criteria, you need to demonstrate that you take on appropriate roles and that you have a natural and approachable manner enabling you to create and maintain good rapport.

Successful candidates demonstrate that they can effectively:

  1. teach the class as a group and individuals within the group, with sensitivity to the learners’ needs and backgrounds, level and context, providing equal opportunities for participation
  2. purposefully engage and involve learners
  3. vary their role in relation to the emerging learning and affective needs of learners during the lesson
  4. listen and respond appropriately to learner contributions.

6a

sensitivity

assessorssay What assessors sometimes say:
The candidate did not nominate sufficiently and allowed some learners to dominate feedback.
The candidate seemed detached and unapproachable.

In your plan, you should have identified any personality and social factors that you need to take into account with this group.  Re-read what you wrote there well before the lesson and plan how you will actually do that.

Here are some ideas:


6b

engagement

assessorssay What assessors sometimes say:
This was a poor choice of text for these learners which did not engage or motivate.
The tasks were completed during the lesson but were under challenging and did not stretch the learners.
The text and tasks were too challenging for these learners and this led to disengagement and frustration.

Partly, this, too, is a planning issue.  Ask yourself some questions:


6c

vary your role

assessorssay What assessors sometimes say:
The candidate was more comfortable during teacher-centred phases and did not sufficiently vary her role to allow her to support individuals and groups.
The candidate dominated from the outset and did not allow learners to develop any autonomy or feel their contributions received adequate attention.

When you look through the procedure grid for your lesson, take a moment to think about what you are doing and what your role is at every stage.  Here are some questions to answer for each phase of the lesson:


6d

listen and respond

assessorssay What assessors sometimes say:
The candidate was quick to recognise and correct errors but did not value or focus on the content of his learners' contributions.
Learners' contributions were ignored when they did not match what the candidate wanted to hear.

This criterion is not (mostly) concerned with how you handle error.  That's part of it, but it is mainly to do with how you attend and react to what your learners say.


The teaching criteria sections and preparing to teach:

Section 6 Section 7 Section 8 Section 9 Preparing to teach
relationships language procedures management visualising the lesson