Pptls_Assignment_1

Roles, responsibilities and boundaries of a tutor/teacher. I am currently working for a small charitable organisation called Open Road West Norfolk Trust. My current role is teaching Personal and Social Development (PSD) as well as Functional Skills. The students I teach are attending from local schools, youth offending teams and pupil referral units. We welcome students from all backgrounds and we are now offering courses to adults that are un-employed. My role as a PSD and functional skills trainer is to be responsible for developing and delivering course material so that it meets the criteria of the Awarding body (IMI Awards) and meet the needs of the students. When I am not teaching I can often act as a councillor to students as they may come from troubled backgrounds and may need someone to talk to, the students are all aware that I am here to listen to anything they have to say and may have to tell someone else, I cannot say to them that “I will keep it to myself” this refers to safeguarding which I have undergone and child protection issues. If a student comes to me and asks me for advice outside my field I cannot give them advice all I can do is refer them to the correct person or organisation to help them, this is a boundary that I face even if I want to advise them. The teaching/training cycle is the steps a tutor should take to ensure maximum effectiveness in a learning environment. I as a tutor follow these steps to make a safe learning environment and that all students are achieve their potential. There are six steps in the teaching cycle I should follow the first being: Assessing the needs of the learners. At Open Road we do this 3 ways, it can be done by the student filling in an application pack, an interview conducted by the manager or an initial assessment which is done on the computers as a literacy and numeracy assessment the students are made aware that “This is not a test or Exam” it is just to determine what level they are working at and what level we should be teaching them at. When a student fills out an application pack it asks them do they consider themselves to have a learning disability whether this be dyslexia or ADHD, I can then plan my lessons to accommodate these students. The second step in the teaching cycle is setting objectives or targets we can do this 2 ways, we can either get the students to write ILPs (individual learning plans) on their induction days or incorporate them into my PSD lessons as SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic , time) targets. The third step in the teaching cycle is planning programmes/courses. As a PSD/ Functional skills trainer it is my responsibility to plan courses so it meets the criteria of the IMI and it plans out how long I should spend on each unit to achieve the credits this is known as guided learning hours, this is the minimum amount of time that is to be spent on each topic. The next step in the teaching cycle is the delivery of the lessons/course. I use multi-sensory sessions which include the use of a combination of PowerPoint, lecturing and videos. The task sheets are designed to require minimal writing and students will be supported during the tasks where needed. The videos also give a visual representation. During my sessions I also have the use of equipment such as the “7 steps to achieving your goal Marshmallow Gun” this gives the students a practical opportunity to visualise their goals. As well as delivering my lessons I have to manage my relationships with the students carefully and treat them all equally so that I am not seen to have a “favourite”. At the end of each session I will do a quick fire question and answer to assess what the students have learnt and sum up the session, this leads onto the next step in the teaching cycle; The fifth step in the teaching cycle is assessments. At Open Road we use different methods of assessment like we do for our initial assessments, we use question and answer sessions, paper based tasks and online exams. The reason that we do this is to assess whether myself as a tutor has correctly delivered the information across to the students for them to achieve their qualifications, if a student is seen to fail or not understand any assessment the teaching cycle would then go back to the delivery of the course to ensure the correct information has been provided and it meets the criteria of the awarding body (IMI). The final stage of the teaching cycle is to evaluate the course/lesson. At the end of each course I would ask the students to fill out an anonymous evaluation sheet to see whether this met their needs and what they think could be improved, I can then look at this and go back to the beginning of the teaching cycle to determine where I have gone wrong and make improvements.