New year - reflections on the past year ...moving forwards

So, it's been a while since I posted to my blog.  It's been such a busy few weeks - starting the 'new academic year' and working with all of my new classes has been a great challenge and it really has been lovely meeting all of my new groups.

I have undertaken to do a few things much better this academic year:

• to encourage much more target language use in GCSE lessons as well as in KS3 classes
• to really push the Year 9 children to make progress, despite them having only one lesson per week
• to ensure that I build more time in for the children to respond to marking and feedback
• to constantly apply more and more of the ideas I pick up from reading other people's blogs and tweets - there are so many great ideas out there!

I'm working on language mats, inspired by @headguruteacher's blog posts about AfL in their MFL department and would like to get the children to try them before the summer break as well, so I can get some feedback from them and make some tweaks as necessary.

Over the past two weeks, whilst trying to get to know my new classes (especially my GCSE groups), I have been trying lots of new ideas - I was really excited when we got approval to share the department wifi access with our students this week.  I want to be able to work with the children to develop the frequency with which they access authentic material - I have been trialling this with them with tablets recently, so that we can use 1jour1actu and also a variety of apps in target language.

I have often thought that it was difficult to reflect on the previous academic year, when one starts the 'new academic year' before the publication of the GCSE results in the summer; however, this year I have found that I am able to reflect on my practice and to talk with my department about our actual teaching, without the context of the exam results - they will come in the summer.  We have been able to really focus our thinking on what we can do best for the children in our care.

One of the things that really excites me about this academic year is that we have ability sets at GCSE for the first time - it is already making a difference to the students' outcomes, and we have only been going for a fortnight so far.  I know that I am pitching things at the right level for the children in my new GCSE German groups, whereas for the past two years, we have been splitting into different groups within the same room for the year (a bit like at primary school) and effectively teaching three different lessons - it has been lovely this fortnight to give the children chance to all work together to pool ideas, because they all feel able to work with one another - the difference is immense.

This past year has seen us build our department blog up and develop a twitter feed for the students to access about the department.  We have had over 2700 hits since January and I hope to really build on this in the coming year.  We started at very humble beginnings with our twitter feed, but are slowly building up - we now have just under 50 followers, so we hope that this will continue.

On a personal note, I have learned loads this year - lots about different classroom ideas, loads about becoming more reflective in my own practice, plenty about how better to offer feedback to the children in my care,  plethora of new activities and ways to explore new technologies in the classroom.  Where have I learned all of this?  Most of it has come from my own exploratory CPD on twitter and on the web as a whole.  Openmindedness is so important in this job and I know that this past year has helped me to open my mind more and more - I hope that I continue to learn and that I will share more and more as the year goes on.  Thank you to everyone who has inspired me this year - there are far too many to name (I only hope I can get to ##ililc or to #thejuneevent this coming year so that I can meet some of you in person).

Happy new year!