Karuna Lobo
Rebuilding lesson plans under a mentor's blunt eye
- Role
- Teacher
- Programme
- PgCTL, with one-on-one mentor feedback near the end
- Takeaways
- Lesson planning and interview preparation
Lesson planning was the part of her practice Karuna trusted least. Working with a one-on-one mentor who told her plainly what was not going well, she rebuilt how she plans around prior knowledge, cognitive level and Bloom's taxonomy, and uses it in class every day.
Feedback, on the face.
Towards the end of PgCTL there is a part where mentors work with teachers one on one. They see how you teach and how you come up with a lesson plan, Karuna Lobo explains, “and then they give you comments”. Her mentor did not soften his. “It’s on the face,” she says. “These things are not going well. These are not going well. You need to improve in these areas.” That, she says, is something which changed things completely.
Every factor in one plan.
Lesson planning is the first of her two favourite takeaways. With Suraasa, the way she built a plan was “quite different”: how structured it had to be, what prior knowledge to use, the use of Bloom’s taxonomy, the cognitive level of the student. “All these factors I had to gel it up together to form a lesson plan and then produce it in a classroom in a given period of time,” she says. She still plans that way. “I use it in my present day classroom too.”
A session the day before.
Her other takeaway came from the final session, which covered what to say when an interviewer asks questions and how to be presentable to them. The session came a day before an interview of her own. “The next day morning is when I got my interview call,” she says, “and that is when I remembered all the points I had to actually prepare for.”
Second thing would be the last session where we had preparation for interviews. That is something which helped me a lot.
