Lessons from the 5 minute presentations

Big thank you to all of you who have delivery your 5 minute presentation this week. I really enjoyed them and hope you got as much out of them as I did. My only regret is that we didn't have more time to reflect on the potential learning that took place. Below I have tried to summarise some of the comments / observations that were made.










1. 5 minutes is not a long time, therefore the presentation needed to be well structured with just a couple of key points and then a question.

2. Questions posed at the beginning or relatively early on helped get the audience engaged and participating taking the 'spotlight' off the presenter.

3. Technology can sometimes let you down.

4. One suggested tip to calm the nerves was to imagine your audience naked !

5. Using props - handout / resource etc. can be useful to tools to support the presentation.

6. Peer teaching can sometimes be more daunting. Fear is that your might be judged more critically, but is this really the case ? The 5 minute presentations demonstrated how supportive of each other you were, which was good to see and bodes well for your micro teach and personal skills presentation as well as collaborative learning within class generally.

7. You can always learn something new from watching others, as well as reflecting on your own performance.


Ok, that will do for the moment, if anyone can remember any other comments or would like yo add anything, then why don't you leave a response in the comment box ?

Initial and Diagnostic Assessment - it's nearly over

Most of you have now completed the majority of the initial and diagnostic assessment tasks and just looking at some of your faces you're looking a bit battered and bruised. I think it's important to remember that it's the taking part that's counts and the opportunity it has afforded you to review your skills, rather than getting too hung up on scores.

In the next few weeks I think it will be useful to reflect on the experience. Firstly, to begin to identify where your strengths lie and what, if any, areas of development you might focus on for your Personal Development Plan (PDP3). But secondly, to think about how you would manage the initial assessment process with your own learners. Part of this whole exercise has been to mirror good practice, so it is important for you as trainee teachers to think about where initial assessment currently fits with your practice, as it will be something I will be looking at as part of the teaching observations.

Initial Assessment

Having got all the college and course inductions out of the way, we are now getting down to some 'real' work and where better to start than with inital assessment. Over the next couple of weeks we will be looking at the subject of initial and diagnostic assessment and you will be undertaking a range of activities to review your own skill levels as well as reflecting on the initial assessment process itself and what it might mean for your learners.

To help in your understanding and research the topic in more detail I have created links to a number of websites such as ReadWritePlus, Quality Improvement Agency and the Key Skills Support Programme, which I think might be of interest.

If you have a particular interest in initial assessment and want to read more then take a lool at the FEDA report Initial Assessment to Identify Learning Needs, it's a little dated (1998) and the link is to a scanned copy, which isn't great, but the information contained within the report still represents good practice.