TEACHING & LEARNING
Build a strong relationship with your in class support. This should be a partnership aimed at developing independent learning for all your students.
Teaching Assistants have different skills to you; they build different relationships with students than you do. Find and acknowledge their strengths, they will be able to achieve progress where sometimes you can’t.
Use their skills strategically for increasing learning. However much you are tempted, support staff should not be managing any of your behaviour problems.
Meet and communicate with your support teacher; know what you are going to teach and how you want them to support that teaching.
Be very clear about your expectations but also listen and ask advice, often they know students better than you do. Know the outcomes that you expect to achieve and agree a plan as to how they will be best achieved.
If the support teacher is supporting a Statemented Student, they must work with that named student; they can however, support other students working in a similar group.
Be very strategic about working with support staff, identify groups or pairs or individual students for support and link this to your assessment processes so that you can monitor the impact of the support. [some students will already be identified for support]
Think about the resources your support teacher will need to be using. If you want them to adapt work you are doing, be considerate about the amount of time they will need to do this.
Take regular feedback from the teaching assistant about the progress they can identify, make sure you are able to record their findings.
Having a strong partnership is the best way to support the students in your class and you have to invest time in order to get the best out of in-class support staff. However, if things are not going as either of you would wish – make sure you talk about problems and solve them quickly.
Working with other adults in the classroom ...
