Teaching Assistant/Learning Support programme

This programme has been designed specifically for TAs/ LSAs following extensive feedback from within academies – further modules are in the design and development stage and will be following shortly.

1. Developing Effective Teamwork

Simply bringing people together doesn’t naturally lead to effective teams. There are a number of skills involved…

Aims: This session aims to explore:

• The importance of effective teams
• The skills required in successful team-building (using Tuckman’s Model)
• A reflection on our own team’s effectiveness

Group Size: 25 people maximum

Feedback: ‘A considered approach to sharing the 12 Cs of effective teamwork that will enable me to work more effectively in a team. A very productive session.’

Requirements: café style tables, IWB with audio, internet-access

2. Powerful Partnerships

Maximising the role of the TA in the classroom

Aims: This course is for Teachers and Teaching Assistants who wish to explore how they can best fulfill their joint roles to maximise learning opportunities for students, integrating best practice into the learning process.

The course will provide:

• Opportunities for forum discussions
• Sharing effective models of good practice.

Delegates will be provided with some active strategies for supporting learning during each stage of a lesson which can be immediately applied to practice.

Group Size: 25-30

3. The role of the TA in Securing Progress for Every Learner

Supporting effective learning- What does it mean?

Aims: This session will explore how children learn, what factors help or hinder learning and how Teaching Assistants can build on their repertoire of techniques to help learners secure progression.

The session also aims to familiarise teaching assistants with effective strategies for addressing differentiation and a range of learning styles.

4. Girls Behaving Badly

The essentials of clear behaviour management in the classroom

Aims: Recent research suggests that there has been a change in attitude in many girls in secondary schools across the country. Ungracious, surly, truculent, deliberately unpleasant behaviour appears to be on the increase. In addition, Inclusion has presented many challenges to behaviour management with the increase in disaffected learners and the knock on effect on all students. There are no easy answers. However, this course aims to explore causes for disaffected behaviour and explore practical strategies which have proven to be successful.

During this course we will provide you with range of tools and techniques you can put into practice back at school to prevent and manage disruptive behaviour , as well as the confidence to tackle issues head on. This course is suitable for teaching assistants, cover supervisors and technicians who support learning and teaching.

Group Size: 25-30

5. Developing Literacy and Learning

Aims: The role of the teaching assistant is crucial in the support of literacy skills. What to support and how to provide support is a familiar dilemma, but knowing where to start helps! This course will help teaching assistants to have a clearer understanding of what exactly ‘literacy’ is; learn how to support effectively; and discover how to encourage children to become independent learners.

This session will explore how TAs can support writing skills through the use of the teaching sequence for writing, how children read: reading strategies and the searchlight model and ways to support students struggling to spell.