Fergal Carroll, Ruairi Cooney

NEST Reflection

For our nest teaching exercise, we were to detail the steps and main points to consider when
approaching your schools and how to make a well though out planning grid that detailed your plans
for each subject during your placement block.in this reflection I will talk about how we felt our
planning, resource gathering, and teaching played out and how each step provided learning to us. It
was our responsibility to provide clear concise and accurate information to the third years to avoid
confusion or anyone getting lost on the topics as they are both very important steps in the
placement process.

Firstly, our planning, we felt this portion of the program went very smoothly. Due to our experience
in each of the topics we where given it took us a relatively short time to plan out the main points and
goals we wanted to hit during our lesson. this allowed us to put more time int our resource
gathering phase and practicing our presentation. Here we could really see the impact SP3 had on us
as we were very well informed of the information and where able to include some of our own
experiences on how to make each of the processes a lot easier.

For the resource gathering stage we built an informative power point around the information we
needed to include. We tried to make sure it was visually pleasing and wasn’t full of long text and too
much information. We planned out our presentation to ensure the main points of each topic where
highlighted and made very clear. Adjoined to this, we added in some of our own personal files and
work to give the students a real-life example of what to aim for. We felt that this personal work
allowed the students to see that standard that is needed and makes it seem less daunting.

Finally, the teaching portion of the exercise. We both felt we did good in this aspect but probably
talked too much and didn’t allow enough time for questioning. Even though we did try and limit the
amount of information we still felt we gave the students a lot of information to process which can be
hard to break down. As for our teaching style and image we felt our voices where confident and we
looked like professional teachers. We weren’t afraid to be at the top of the room and I felt myself
that I could see how much calmer I am at public speaking due to my time during SP3. We believe
that we made a great impact on the students and gave then the information that they needed to
successfully contact their schools as professional individuals and to write amazing planning grids for
their placement block.