Suzanne Vaidya
Reaching four-year-olds when the classroom moved online
- Teaches
- Foundation stage two, children of four and five
- Programme
- PgCTL, an express batch with classes through the summer
- Key module
- Technology and teaching, the last of ten
Suzanne teaches foundation stage two, where learning had always meant play, mess and movement around the room, until the pandemic put her class in front of a screen. The PgCTL technology module gave her ways to hold the attention of four and five-year-olds online.
A vocation, in her words.
Suzanne Vaidya wants one thing understood before she talks about any course. “Teaching for me is not really a profession, it’s a vocation,” she says. “I absolutely love my job.” What gives her the greatest joy, she says, is being there to see the “light bulb moments” of children as young as four and five. She took PgCTL in an express batch that had classes through the summer.
Beyond the perfect lesson plan.
She found the ten modules very specific. Learning theories, she says, “gave a name to all the efforts and all the procedures that we as teachers follow through” without knowing them in their entirety. Child development, studied as a teacher of such young children, made her realise the importance of “every single action that I took or didn’t take for my little learners”.
Lesson planning, she says, is something teachers often get overwhelmed by. She describes herself as “extremely panicky about checking every box that’s needed to be done”, and says being taught ways to manage her time and work smartly helped a great deal. The modules on class dynamics and questioning skills pointed to what gets overlooked “because we are so involved with creating this perfect lesson plan”. Assessment and evaluation, she says, showed her how crucial that element is with young learners.
In front of a computer.
The pandemic changed teaching as she knew it, from online learning to connecting with children through a screen. She credits the course with giving her “the skills and the ammunition, so to speak” to counter those changes. In the early years, she says, “everything was play and learning through play and moving around the classroom and getting messy”. Then “suddenly we were plucked out of that particular platform and put in front of a computer”. The course allowed her, she says, to connect with her learners during the pandemic. “I think nothing prepared us for that, except probably what we learned in the course.”
The last module, which was technology and teaching, was very helpful for an early years teacher like myself.
