Let's start at the very beginning.

I'm keeping this journal for an assignment for my teacher training. There's a lot to think about, but I'll start with a classroom reflection while it's fresh in my memory.

We talked today about teaching style and learning style, which brought to mind one particular class I have, an Entry 2 IT class. Last week, we did some work on using the mouse, as a lot of the students find this difficult- particularly considering that many of them have never used a computer before. At the end of the exercises I had planned, I gave them some games to play to get them using the mouse for different things (double-clicking, drag and drop and other things they often have trouble with). It seemed to go fine, but then this week the course tutor told me they'd moaned to her. Or rather, some of them had. I shouldn't be surprised that they didn't say anything to me- students in our department are always very polite. I think the trouble stems from the fact that many of them are used to very 'traditional' teaching, and my teaching style tends to be not so much about that. Of course part of the problem there is that my teacher training was all about new and current methods- the traditional methods were discussed but usually rejected as not as effective as other newer ones. Even teacher training concepts used by some of my colleagues were dismissed- ones still in use at other colleges training people on the same course. My college used the 'Engage, Study, Activate' model of lesson planning, but colleagues of mine use 'Presentation, Practice, Production'. I shall have to look at how the two map together. But back to the class- I think I need perhaps to look at the old methods- the ones that many of these students got when they were last in a learning environment, but I'm not convinced by the argument that says I should teach these students in this way because that is what they expect. Then again, it may be that if the class isn't how they expect it to be, they won't learn as effectively because they're too busy getting bothered by the fact that it's different to how they've learned in the past.
Though I have to say that one student, in particular, who was, according to my colleague, the most 'worried' about what my lesson would be like, took a dislike to me on day one, when I gave the class a diagnostic test to do.
M: "You tell them what these things are [indicating a label-the-picture task] and then they will know!"
Me: "M, this is a test to help me find out what you know and don't know, so I can plan what to teach you. If I tell you the answers, how will I know whether you knew them already or not?"
Of course in terms of my attitude to her, hearing that she has moaned about the lessons not being what she expects didn't exactly endear her to me.

The lesson yesterday (game-free) seemed to go fine, Smartboard death and no-whiteboard-pen notwithstanding. But so did the other class, so perhaps one thing I need to work on as a teacher is being able to judge things like that from the point of view of the students, because evidently they won't tell me if something's wrong- why would they? I never would have done when I was at school.

As for learning styles, apparently I'm a very visual learner. But I wonder whether some assessment of the different types of intelligence students have would be valuable- as in the longer 'multiple intelligences' list which of course I can't remember offhand- but contains things like logical/mathematical and musical as well as the Big 3 (visual, audio, kinaesthetic). Clearly I need to root out my notes on that and see what I can see.