Reflection: Summarise your main learning about your teaching and next steps

Task: Write a reflection in which you summarise your main learning about your teaching and next steps. This will prepare you to design an intervention next time.

Hypothesis: A focus on critical thinking and causal reasoning when responding to texts will support increased levels of critical thinking and ability to create causal links in online written interactions with others for year 5 children reading between 10 and 12 years.

Main learnings from peer observation and self assessment of my teaching practice:

Over the last few weeks, I have done both a self assessment and had a peer observation of my teaching practice. The focus of these observations was on how I encourage critical thinking and causal links in a reading group. Below are my main findings from this process:

1. I am often too quick to repeat or rephrase my questions. This doesn't give the children enough time to think and respond to what I have asked.

2. I need to be thoughtful and careful with the questions I ask so I provide a good prompt/provocation to get the children thinking but not too much to take over their ability to think critically.

3. I need to take a step back and allow the children to do more of the talking. This will be a fine balance because I still need to be providing support and teaching the children new strategies.

4. The children are quick to respond to me as the teacher but not so much to each other. The children do not tend to ask each other questions. It is very much a conversation between each of them and me. The experience needs to be more of a network where the children feel they can ask and respond to everyone in the group.

Next steps:

- Observe a number of teachers taking reading groups of a similar level to this group. Observe the types of questions these teachers ask and how they encourage the children to do the thinking.

- Encourage the children to respond to each other and to ask each other questions from the text.

- Encourage more causal links by the children. Teach a number of ways that this could look. They don't just have to use the word 'because.'