Personal Learning Experiences
“Learning without thought is labour lost; thought without learning is perilous.” Confucius, The Sayings of Confucius
Here are my recollections of learning from primary and secondary school and from a recent course which I completed as part of my career development.
Primary school (1970ish)
When at primary school, an English lesson taken by our class teacher, Mrs Mander was on writing individual letters. The teacher demonstrated how to do this and talked about how to form the shape of the letters, highlighting the fact that some letters went under and some went over the lines (eg. the letter ‘g’ went under, while the letter ‘h’ goes above). We copied the letters into our exercise books, taking care over how they went over or under the lines in our books and then practised joining the letters ‘r’ and ‘p’ to words. We were developing the skill of writing individual letters correctly and joining letters together, in order to write whole words. We were learning this in order to be able to write as part of the national curriculum and our work was to be marked by the teacher and looked at by parents; there were house points at stake for good work (neatly presented / good quality work).
Secondary school (1989)
At secondary school we had an A level lesson on Haiku poetry. The teacher read out a few Haiku poems and elicited a whole-class discussion. The way in which he delivered the poems was theatrical and the nature of the style of poetry garnered puzzlement and interest from the start of the lesson. He questioned our understanding of the content of each poem and prompted us to analyse how they were formed and to consider why they were formed in this way. We learnt about Haiku poetry in general and about the structure of Haiku poems, and developed skills in analysing and identifying types of syntax. I think the aim was to help us to contextualise the other forms of poetry we were looking at (Shakespeare, J. Donne, war poems; the poems of Robert Browning); I don’t remember lesson objectives being made explicit when I was at school.
Professional career (The other day)
A professional learning experience was a lesson on how to coach football, led by an inspiring FA coach. In the first part of the session the coach outlined what we would be learning about and doing, and he presented information relating to general good coaching practice, before we divided into groups. Each group had a different football skill to discuss and needed to create a warm-up activity which would develop this skill in players. We took on board a lot of new information relating to the FA style of coaching (termed the FA DNA) and developed skills in planning a coaching session which met the FA criteria. We were learning in order to deliver the coaching to fellow course participants the following week, and to use in our future football coaching.
