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School Experience and What it Can Mean to You.

After attending a school experience day at the Cherwell school, it became clear that the OTT SCITT was what I wanted in terms of training.  On the school experience day, I met members of staff and Associate Teachers, currently completing their placement at Cherwell, who all spoke extremely highly of the OTT programme.  Furthermore, staff also spoke about their motivations and passion for teaching which resonated with me and made me even more confident that teaching is the right career for me.  During the school experience day, I also observed a couple of lessons which gave me insight to how schools run from the ‘teacher side’ of things.  Prior to these lesson observations, I met with Emma Rapson who talked me through what to look for in observations and provided me with a clearly structured observation form to help me know what to focus on in the lesson.  The lessons I observed clearly demonstrated the principles of effective teaching outlined on the form, and verbally by Emma. In hindsight, doing these observations, prior to starting my training with OTT, definitely made me feel more confident starting out as I already had an idea of what to expect in the classroom.  This experience also highlighted to me the importance that OTT places on teaching and learning and making complex pedagogical concepts accessible to Associate Teachers from the get go.  Staff involved in the SCITT made it clear that they were eager to foster the development of new teachers into the profession and were willing to share their own experiences of teaching and the knowledge they had.  I really appreciated the design of the program meaning we were in placement schools from the beginning of September, including INSET days. This really gave us the chance to feel a bit more settled when students arrived.  I also think that starting to teach classes from the 3rd week has been really beneficial- there was less time to overthink it and more time to actually get in there and practise it!  My subject specialists clearly knew what was covered in the central sessions, and designed subject sessions to further my knowledge, in each area, as it related to RE.

Eden Shields – Religious Education Associate Teacher

If you feel inspired to attend a School Experience Programme day please sign up via our Events Page, HERE