Teacher's Pet

I had one of the biggest days in my burgeoning teaching career yesterday.

While I have been an assistant tutor in the Display Screen Equipment assessment training in our place for a couple of years now, backing up and learning from a consultant with 20yrs experience, yesterday was the first time I have run a course solo - from arranging the scheme of work, designing the day to the presentation of the 'talkee-talkee'.

My class were mostly keen staff, desperate to learn the black art of risk assessment to help their teams and add to their skill base. Out of the class of 12 there were a couple of old friends, a few staff I have spoken to a lot, some new faces and one very reluctant conscript.

After a few minutes of speaking I saw the first moments of clarity begin to dawn and pens began to scratch. I was imparting information, my class were learning!
Everything from the law to the desk, the day long course covered all aspects of assessment of office workstations.

By lunch I was only 10 minutes over - mainly because there were so many questions; which can be good and bad in my book!
The afternoon practical sessions were not as good as I had hoped, but I have plans to change that bit of the day to something more manageable.
By the time we were doing the final test, we were about 15 minutes over schedule - not too bad for a busy, busy day.....including losing a student for about 20 minutes!

Point of order, the individual with the worst results in the final test was the one whose colleague told him that the class were given the answers before doing the paper because she had done the course three weeks earlier with my predecessor.
I pointed out to him that my predecessor and I had very different ideas about the concept of 'test'........he stopped looking quite so smug while the class roared with laughter.

I hope it was a success from their perspective. I haven't looked at the feedback yet, but I did glance at a couple while packing up and the marks were in the 'good' range, so I am crossing my fingers!

Update: I have checked the feedback and it was all positive. A couple of students made some suggestions that I had already thought of to improve the training. Yay me! :-)

cq