What I teach

TransitionTimes: Teachers tell us how they approach the freedom of transition year

Annette Leonard
St Mary's Secondary School,
Ballina, Co Mayo

"For the last few years I have been teaching transition-year students how to teach PE. They start out by assessing my performance as a PE teacher. We talk about issues such as discipline, supervision and safety: the aspects of teaching that they perhaps do not notice as students.

"Then they set about the task of deciding which PE subject they would like to teach. In our case the secondary school shares grounds with the primary school, so we agreed with the primary teachers that our transition-year students would teach their second-class pupils.

"The girls chose a range of activities to teach, including basketball, camogie, gymnastics, tennis [Maria Sharapova, below\] and dance. Having chosen, each student was required to go and research their sport, finding out about its history and structure and teaching methods.

"They had to work out schemes of work and lesson plans for each class. Through this they learned what every teacher knows: that every minute of every class has to be carefully mapped out in advance. This was a surprise to them.

"Before taking classes with the sixth years they role-played classes with each other. They practised dealing with situations such as indiscipline.

"Then they started to take real classes. They had teachers nearby at all times to help. The primary children loved the experience, and the primary teachers enjoyed learning about teaching new sports too. The transition-year students learned a lot from the experience - some of them learned that they never wanted to be teachers. Many more had a real flair for communicating with young people.

"Even those who did not take naturally to the role learned a great deal about organisational skills, teamwork, communication, sport and leadership.

"For those girls who really took to the role, we followed up with careers talks about what's involved in getting a teaching qualification.

They now know, for example, that if they want to go on and be teachers they will have to work hard at Irish from now until the Leaving Cert. It has helped to give them focus for the exam years."

Send your thoughts on teaching in transition year to lholden@ irish-times.ie