Cara Hewis and Adam Roy

Getting your School Experience File right is a fundamental part of school placement – and it is also the aspect which many students, including us, found most challenging in Year 2! Having never created a School Experience File before, we had so many questions:

• is the information I’m including relevant?
• is this evaluation detailed enough?
• should I include these resources?

The list was endless.

After a huge amount of work, we completed our year two placements and produced School Experience Files that we were proud of. Now in year three, we decided to share everything we had learned with the Year 2 students by hosting a CPD event where they would be invited to come along and have a look at our second year School Experience Files. We understand that it’s perhaps sometimes easier to ask questions or share worries with a fellow student rather than a tutor, therefore we also wanted to ensure that the event provided the second year students with an opportunity to ask us any questions about second year in general.

Prior to the event, we met with Catherine Whitley who is the Pedagogy and Placement Learning (PPL) module leader for Year 2. Catherine notified us of the minor changes that had been applied to the PPL module for this year, so that all the knowledge we would be sharing with the Year 2 students was up-to-date. We had a huge response to the advert for the event which meant that we had to reserve two rooms to cater for the numbers of second year students who wanted to attend. To ensure there was a selection of folders available for the second years to view, we selected ten confident, outgoing and knowledgeable third year students to participate in the event. We planned to split the second years into groups and rotate the folders around every five to ten minutes to make sure that our time was well-utilised and the second years were exposed to a variety of folders. We created a power point which detailed all the major pieces of advice we deemed most important to share, and also incorporated question time at the beginning and end of the event.

After the event, the feedback we received was very positive. All who attended agreed that they had found it beneficial and were grateful to the third years for arranging it. From the perspective of third year students, being able to share our knowledge with the second years was not only helpful for them, but important for us too. After the event, we agreed that the event had reiterated the huge amount we had learned throughout the duration of Year 2. We both came away from the event feeling confident, driven and excited about our up-coming placements. We hope the second years left the event feeling the same way.

Cara Hewit & Adam Roy