What was your previous teaching experience?
Before having children, I spent most of my career in academia. I studied up to PhD-level with a focus on children living in conflict zones. When my youngest started nursery I started to think about my career again and what that might look like in the UAE. I was interested in working with children but on a more practical level in a profession such as teaching.
At first I started with private 1:1 tutoring and with small groups. A few years later I took my next step by applying for a job as a learning assistant at The British School Al Khubairat in Abu Dhabi.
How did you come to take our iPGCE course?
The school has an ethos that supports CPD and so it was easy to request a meeting and talk through my options. The government had just allowed private schools to facilitate teacher training and my school were happy to support me if they approved the programme.
I researched several options, studied the modules offered, evaluated the balance of academic and practical elements and discussed these with the head of primary. We agreed on the Tes Institute iPGCE, one year programme.
How did you manage to work and study at the same time?
The flexibility of online learning enabled me to keep my full-time learning assistant job and manage my family commitments.
My practical elements were carried out during my normal working day and the academic requirements were worked on at home during evenings, weekends and holidays.
What support did you get from your school and Tes Institute?
My school assisted with paperwork, facilitated teaching opportunities and provided a mentor to supervise the practical, in-school aspects of the course.
The Tes Institute team were on hand to ensure that my school understood their obligations, checked the mentor was qualified to assist me and provided a pathway tutor who supervised my progression.
My pathway tutor communicated regularly with me, providing feedback and advice on work submitted through the online platform. She uploaded regular observations and reports, as well as conducting an external observation in school.
Joanne, the programme director, was also extremely quick to respond to any questions and concerns both during the course and afterwards.
What advice would you give to anyone thinking of taking this course?
If you’ve the opportunity to go to another school or carry out your training in more than one key stage, I recommend you do it. My placements were in early years and a Year one class, this experience definitely helped me to build up my teaching confidence. Working in different classrooms with a varity of pupils has helped me throughout my training.
I’d also suggest that you have more than one teacher observing you during the course as this will help you receive a variety of feedback. The observation forms are really detailed so having multiple teachers complete them gave me new ideas on how to improve my practice. These forms are really useful if you want to continue your training to gain qualified teacher status (QTS).
What did you enjoy most about your iPGCE?
There were several things that I enjoyed about this course, one being the opportunity to undertake research. During the Master's level modules I was able to research topics that I was learning about on a practical level to gain a stronger pedagogical understanding.
The second thing I enjoyed was receiving feedback via observations which gave me the opportunity to improve my practical skills.
Have you achieved what you wanted to after completing this course?
My ambition was to qualify from a credible training programme and to gain my QTS. I'm pleased that due to the emphasis on practical training I'm able to move onto the next stage of teacher training after finishing my iPGCE and from September 2020, I’ll be working towards my QTS via Tes Institute’s Assessment Only route.
