PREMIUM: Supervising independent work

Part 15 of the My Teaching series.

The story so far…

I have been looking at how I used to teach (when my pupils achieved impressive results) and how I teach now. I don’t think I am currently doing anything impressive, but I still believe it’s worth reflecting on how I teach.

In Part 1, I described the context in which I work:

• I teach part-time and don’t have my own classroom.

• My school has policies that dictate many lesson features and routines.

• As part of those policies, all lessons are based on workbooks.

So far, there have been fourteen main posts.¹

• Part 1: How I start a lesson

• Part 2: Taking the register

• Part 3: Handing things out

• Part 4: Completing and marking the Engage Task

• Part 5: Using the mini whiteboards

• Part 6: It’s 2025 and I’m still using PowerPoint

• Part 7: Starting an explanation

• Part 8: How I try to make my examples work

• Part 9: The process of explanations

• Part 10: More on the process of explanations

• Part 11: Explaining to different types of class

• Part 12: More about mini whiteboard questioning

• Part 13: Bringing my teaching up to date

• Part 14: Setting independent work to be done in workbooks (or worksheets)

In Part 14, I explained how I set work that was appropriate to my class to maximise the time spent working. In this post, I will look at how I organise and supervise the class during written work.