David
Key Stage 2, 3 and 4
Waltham Forest
I have worked within Secondary Education for 10 years, having previously worked within a Higher Education and local government positions. During my teaching career I progressed through the roles of Head of Department, Deputy Head of Faculty and Head of Faculty, culminating in my last position as Associate Assistant Principal. My main responsibility as an AAP was the design, introduction and leadership of a new whole-school “Personal Development” subject, covering various aspects of SRE, Health, Finance, Careers and Citizenship. A key aim of this course was to build resilience, interpersonal and other transferable skills.
Availability
Online & Face-to-face Sessions
Weekends – Any time before 1pm
£110 per hour
How I teach Geography
As a Head of Humanities, and previously Head of Geography, I was able to produce significant improvements in both progress and attainment across all of the departments I led. In all cases this process started with encouraging all teachers to understand, and then be able to justify, why they were teaching certain topics or key skills and to make sure that they had a very thorough understanding of the National Curriculum for their individual subject. In the case of my subject specialism, Geography, this process of improvement has seen me completely rewrite the Key Stage 3 and 4 schemes of work for my last two schools, taking a top-down approach to match all learning to the requirements of external exam syllabuses, and to embed key skills in a helical manner to ensure that all students have the ability to perform to the best of their ability.
How I teach Humanities
I have taught History, Sociology and Citizenship all to GCSE level, and Religious Studies at GCSE and A-Level; one of the key aspects of being a Humanities teacher is the ability foo be able to work outside of your subject specialism and to be able to ensure that you can do this to an equally high standard. Although the taught content for each subject is of course different, they share many of the same key skills such as source analysis, the synthesis of information into persuasive arguments and the ability to recall facts and dates for short answers.
How I teach children with focus and concentration difficulties
My experience in education has shown me that children with certain labels can often feel that they have to live up to them. Children described as lacking concentration skills can tend to exhibit this in subjects that they find less enjoyable, but it is very rare for this to be the case in all of their subjects. It is therefore the responsibility of the teacher to find ways to make their subject accessible and enjoyable, and to be able to adapt this to the needs of individual children. In the case of Geography this frequently requires the use of current, real-world examples to explain key scientific principles, or the incorporation of flow-charts to help a child to understand geographical processes or to be able to work through an essay-style question or construct a logical and free-flowing answer.
How I support children and young people’s confidence and self-esteem
All of my teaching career has been spent working in areas of high social deprivation, often with quite transient school communities including substantial numbers of children who have been excluded from other schools or have completed managed moves within the local area. In many cases these children will have substantial gaps in their subject knowledge, which has a knock-on effect on their confidence and subsequent attainment. A first step to reversing this is to help the student to identify these gaps and then understand exactly what is required of them to reach a particular grade or level, for example by explaining syllabus-content on a topic-by-topic basis and by working through exam-style questions and then providing immediate feedback, helping the student to understand how to improve their answers and score better results.
How I create fun lessons that impart knowledge
During my time in Secondary Education I mentored and coached a large number of trainee of PGCE students and NQT teachers. One of the most frequent issues they faced was to try to incorporate a very wide range of activities into their lessons to make them fun, without considering how they helped children to learn or to gain specific knowledge that would be required later as a foundation to more complicated topics or concepts. Students enjoy lessons when they feel like they are making progress, and when this can then be demonstrated by their securing good scores in quizzes, exam-style questions and formative and summative assessments.