Kyle Maples

Teaching is such an exciting and rewarding career as no day is ever the same. It is an incredible experience to be able to see students gaining knowledge, skills, and new information in real time within the classroom. My History teacher inspired me to and instilled a love for History within me. I now want to pay this forward and teach students the importance of understanding and respecting our shared and individual histories. As a teacher of History, I will be a life learner alongside educating our students. I will be evidence informed, ensuring researched ideas make my lessons creative and adaptable to the school curriculum. While I teach, I always strive to make a difference and want to witness visible results; there is a feeling of success when witnessing a pupil's face 'click'. I ensure my classroom is a safe, positive, high expectation, and stimulating environment where students are treated with respect.
History is a significantly important subject to study, we live in the present and we plan for the future, nonetheless, it is vital to understand where we are going and what progression looks like. We require an appreciation of history, initially by understanding where we come from. In my opinion, history is one of the most respected and valuable academic subjects to study. Studying history allows development and an understanding of the world, learning how past societies, governments, cultures and how the world operated in periods. History allows inspiration for pupils, studying times of suffering and joyous times, lessons on the curriculum can often be applied to personal life experiences. History gives the ability to understand identity, by delivering content on countries, and how people of the past have contributed to where we are today. George Santayana perfectly explains why history should be studied, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.
During my second year of university, I joined Tradewind, a teaching agency, where I worked in several schools, gaining vital understanding into teaching as a profession and how best we can ensure access to learning and progress for all students. After becoming established in certain Manchester schools, I received a long-term Cover Supervisor position at Manchester Health Academy that lasted for one and a half years. The experience I gained was vital remained resilient through, what can be described as, one of the most challenging years to train to teach. I have developed my creative teaching style to ensure to my successful application to the MTSA School Direct program whereby I have all lessons are adaptable to every student. I am a firm believer that all children have a right to an education, and we should scaffold and differentiate our teaching to allow every student the opportunity to learn and make excellent progress. I have maintained a steadfast passion towards developing my curriculum knowledge as well as understanding of different pedagogical approaches. All of this I know will significantly support my teaching journey as I become an Early Career Teacher.
My most successful lesson to date was under the unit of the ‘Crusades’ and the learning question was ‘Why did Pope Urban II launch the First Crusade in 1095?’ to my Year 7 class. I am inspired by Doug Lemov’s pedagogical skills, I find it exciting to watch his pedagogy, and his book 'Teach Like a Champion' is extremely useful to use in my classroom. I have embedded strategies such as ‘sitting like a scholar’ and ‘tracking the speaker’. These significantly encourages students to engage in tasks and discussions, creating a stimulating educational climate for learning. As most of the class followed the religions Islam or Christianity, we had the opportunity to clear any misconceptions between each other under the focus of the Crusades. I focus on oracy skills to constantly assess my students’ position in the class, this embeds their knowledge and demonstrates progression. In my lessons, there is no option to opt-out of participating, everybody must contribute. We discussed the etymology of the keywords in the lesson for example 'Crusade. I then had a map of Jerusalem, I used retrieval techniques to allow the meaning of the three religious faiths that find Jerusalem to be a location of holy significance including the Dome of the Rock, the Western Wall, and the Holy Sepulchre, we annotated the reasons why all three are separately significant. I read aloud the textbook pages; this group require continuous assessment after paragraphs. I prepared questions to ask while using popcorn to ensure one hundred per cent is engaged. To consolidate the lesson so far, I used a map of Europe to tell the story of the First Crusade, nonetheless, my methodology was retrieval, the most inspiring part of the lesson was the students having the ability and the confidence, believing in themselves to make annotations with myself, making understanding of why the speech of Pope Urban II was made in Clermont, France. I set four questions upon leaving they would answer without using their textbooks. While the students did that, I issued exit tickets for their books and gave them an extra challenge to 'tell me three interesting facts you have learned today. I reviewed their books that afternoon, the feedback I received was positive, and the outcomes of that lesson were met to an extremely high standard.
I have experience in extra-curricular activities, I am working on oracy skills now with a pupil I have the pleasure to teach, the pupil suffers from a severe stammer and stutter. The pupil and I stay back for intervention on Mondays and Fridays, working on the progression of his speech and his confidence in reading. On Thursday I work together as part of the History intervention provision for those pupils who require extra assistance on certain topics. In my previous school, I was a member of the Rainbow Club, which is an LGBT club to support pupils who are struggling to identify with their sexuality and well-being. This is a heart-warming and inspiring club to participate in.