Empowering trainee teachers:

Working with student teachers helps teachers reflect on their own practice. They have to share with others skills which are intrinsic to their teaching and have become second nature. Claire Brayne, English mentor, is conducting a research project on a specific key skill which teachers implicitly use in the classroom but would find challenging to articulate; body language.

"What is it that gives a teacher that presence in the classroom?"
"How are some teachers quietly confident and others overtly extrovert and flamboyant?"

These are questions that I am addressing in this research. Teacher's Body Language was the topic of a morning session for the English PGCE(M) trainees earlier in the year and their feedback suggested that this is an area of interest for their training. I created a series of PowerPoint slides with some footage of teachers teaching, asked trainees to engage in some role play and we had some discussion time. I asked trainees to complete an evaluation. Here are some of the responses I received:

"I would like:

more role play,
confidence building,
to know how to stay calm,
to practise observer's comments on my body language and
to know how to deal with pupils in a calm non confrontational manner."

This then triggered me to involve our pupils at AHS. I invited a local artist and a local poet in for separate sessions and they engendered responses from the pupils regarding what makes the essence of a teacher! As I digest what the experts (pupils) have said I am planning to observe colleagues within the school focussing on their body language. It is my intention to visit English PGCE trainees in their second placement schools, observe their body language and explore this aspect of their teaching more fully on an individual basis. I certainly hope that this research will empower English trainee teachers to enter classrooms knowing that they are doing so with, at least apparent, confidence thus giving pupils boundaries and securities which may have otherwise been missing.