Anthony Wells, Executive Deputy in 2 Lincolnshire schools, talks about his mentoring experience with Richard Pountney, lead for the mentoring strand of the Wipro Programme.
Anthony and Richard Transcript
Anthony also reflects further on his time on the programme: “Over the last 2 years since joining the Wipro mentoring program through Sheffield Hallam University, I have had the opportunity to work with a wonderful teacher in developing her professional skills and classroom practice. The training for myself through the mentoring course, was a very useful refresher in how to be an effective mentor to others and allowed me to deepen my own skills with regards to supporting teachers to strengthen the teaching and learning in their own classrooms. Not only has this had a positive impact with the fellow that I was supporting on their project but it also allowed me to improve my own approach to professional development in my role, particularly with regards to teacher appraisal and their going support. This has moved from a few meetings spread throughout the year to be more regular discussions that are purposeful.
The project that the fellow I was working with was a very interesting one. As a Design Technology lead across my schools, her project for creating a space that allows the youngest children in school to gain independency and expand their skills in a range of different aspects of the DT curriculum was quite exciting. Through our meetings we discussed and explored the use of pupil voice as a method to get a baseline of pupil’s understanding of the areas being taught and then as a benchmarking tool for assessment of progress. From the start she had a vision of what the “Helpdesk” set up would look like and we refined this vision to ensure it was clear for other teachers in their parallel foundation classrooms to understand specifically what the purpose would be and the expectations. During the course of the project, we had many discussions around challenges that had been faced and collaboratively identified strategies that could reduce barriers to access for pupils. For example, the use of technology such as iPads with QR codes used to view videos of demonstrations of the skills being taught, the rationale was to allow the children to watch how to and then try themselves on a particular skill. Although this was a superb idea, the practicality of it relied heavily on the pupil’s being able to use the technology effectively. However, due to their younger age and experiences this meant that a barrier was in place to their use of the work station. Our ongoing discussions led to adaptations to meet the needs of a range of learners with a balance of technology use and sequenced pictures.
The project has been very successful and rolled out across all of the foundation stage classrooms in her own school and into the rest of Key Stage 1 when DT is the focus area of the curriculum. Further to this, I have brought the model to the foundation stage setting in one of my own schools, with another looking to adopt this approach from September.
I strongly believe that the mentoring meetings we held allowed the fellow to reflect and articulate how she was scaffolding, evaluating and then adapting her ideas to meet the needs of all learners in her setting. Throughout the course of the year, I could also see her confidence growing in becoming a more effective leader in the project with clarity of purpose and communicating her vision, research and methodology consistently improving.”