There are three professional placements in the year.

For the first two placements, trainees are in school with a partner from the course. This has been a welcome part of the course. Support is provided and trainees have another practitioner from whom they can learn. Placement one comes a month into the course and is a two week placement. Observation of the class teacher is the main exercise during the first week, in order to examine strategies of behaviour management and methods of teaching in a classroom context. During the second week, trainees undertake some teaching.

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Placement two begins after the Christmas holidays in January and lasts for six weeks. Trainees build up their teaching load so that by the end of the placement they have taken responsibility for a whole week's Literacy planning and teaching, a whole week's Maths planning and teaching and five whole-days teaching.

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I found the way the responsibility built up to be suitably paced so that both my partner and myself felt quite confident while undertaking whole-days teaching, about which we had been apprehensive at the beginning of the placement. Involvement in a school for a complete half term was very useful and we were involved in extra-curricular activities such as Netball Club and Year 6 Maths Club as well as other elements of school life, assembly preparation, for example.

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Having a partner in the school meant that we could consult on areas of planning to ensure continuity. More importantly it allowed us to undertake projects with the class that could make full use of an extra adult in the classroom.

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One such example was an art display we carried out with a Year two class. As part of a themed 'History Week' my partner and I chose a painting from the period and decided to recreate it, with each member of the class concentrating on one area. Using a computer, we put a grid over the painting by French artist, Paul Signac, and gave each child a copy of this so that they could see how their individual section fitted into the whole. Projected onto the whiteboard was going to be a colour copy of the painting, but due to technological failure, we had to resort to the laptop screen and call individual children over to check the colours they were mixing with pastels.

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As you can see in the Fig. 1 below, the result is not a perfect recreation but the process was far more important than the product. To demonstrate this we put up, beside the finished piece, the children's experiments with pastels that they had done in preparation (Fig.2). Key skills of working in a team were developed as children had to make sure lines they were making flowed into the consecutive sections. Observation was also important as children had to concentrate on reproducing specific colours as closely matched as possible.

〈Fig.2〉

〈Fig.1〉