MMU Focus Group Meeting

Today I went to Didsbury for a Focus Group meeting. The idea of these meetings is for Professional Development School Mentors to meet up to put forward ideas to change the course for Trainee Teachers at MMU.

This was the first time I'd attended, and I quite enjoyed it. We learned about the some of the new initiatives that the university plan to introduce.

I worked in a group to plan a clearer progression for trainees in the Monitoring and Assessment standards. This is something that is badly needed as sometimes I feel trainees ought to know more about MARRA than they do, particularly in the third year.

I suggested a focus for another meeting could be to begin to prepare a set of standards for each year of the BA course. If there were standards for each year group it would eliminate the different interpretations the QTS standards, and discourage mentors from claiming trainees have met the standards before Year Four of the course.