About the Assignment
For the Professional Values and Practice module there is one summative assessment and it is worth 100% of the marks for the module:
Assignment: A 4000 word essay, comprising introduction, two main parts, conclusion, reference list and supporting appendices.
Title: ‘Online PGCE Reflective Report – Professional Values and Practice’
Make sure that you follow the framework provided.
Please take time to familiarise yourself with the Module Handbook which includes lots more information, including the marking criteria, plagiarism, and fitness to submit.
Assignment structure template: PVP Assignment Structure Template
You can use 1st or 3rd person as appropriate. Both options are acceptable.
Please see the academic writing example texts that have been selected to help you develop your own academic writing skills to meet Level 7 marking descriptors:
• Examples Academic Writing Example 1 and Academic Writing Example 2
Assignment Structure
This section contains the detailed guidance which should help you to structure your assignment.
Introduction – approximately 250 words
Part 1 – Discussion around your professional values
1. Learning journey.
Using your journey into teaching so far, reflect on how your personal values relate to the professional values associated with becoming a teacher. If you have submitted the Introductory Assignment(pen portrait) for the Induction module, then your pen portrait can be included in this section and counted towards this part. As you have not been graded on the introductory assignment, it will not count as self-plagiarism.
2. Context of practice.
Discuss the context of practice, including the ethos and values associated with the school and your role as a teacher.
(If you have completed the introductory assignment then you have already made a good start on some of this part – ensure that you respond to the feedback and develop in the light of your experience and your understanding of the theoretical and policy literature related to your learning journey and context of your practice.)
Take the work that you did for your introductory assignment and attend to any comments and suggestions made by your Module Tutor and the Online Learning Tutor. Ensure that you proofread your work and reference correctly. There is plenty of guidance on referencing. You may lose marks for poorly referenced work, even at this stage on the course (see the level 7 grade descriptors in your Module Handbook).
You can refer to the Teachers’ Standards and try out a model of reflective practice to develop your criticality.
Part 2 – Policy Analysis
1. Locate a curriculum planning document (scheme of work) that extends over several weeks (not a single lesson).
2. Identify and critically reflect on a relevant school policy related to teaching and learning in relation to the design and implementation of your chosen curriculum planning document.
3. Critically reflect on the effectiveness of your chosen curriculum planning document in relation to the chosen school policy. You should use data from a range of sources (these might include for example progress and attainment).
Question everything. Challenge everything. One or two things will strike you as puzzling, surprising or odd. These are the nuggets that will sustain your criticality throughout the course.
Reflective Conclusion – approximately 250 words
References
Appendices
– include any document, important notes that you think is useful to share in support of the assignment. Please delete any names and sensitive information (e.g. school name, students, colleague or teacher name, etc.)
– you can either include the entire policy document or the most relevant section (either with screenshot or the document itself)
– any other information you find relevant to include (lesson plan, curriculum plan, etc (your field notes or observation notes are not required to be included).
Assignment guidance
Here is a helpful podcast episode on how to approach, structure and write your PVP assignment. Read to this episode for advice and guidance:
PVP Assignment Guidance Meri & Alina
Transcript
00:00:03 Alina
Hi and welcome to our mini podcast where the course director and PVP module leader Meri will guide us through the PVP assignment. In this episode, we’ll touch base on what’s expected you from this assignment. What this module is about and how to write a good first assignment. Let me introduce you to our course director Meri.
00:00:27 Meri
Hi Alina, hi everyone.
00:00:30 Alina
It’s nice to have you here. Would you please be able to say just in a few brief words what this module is about and the structure of this first assignment?
00:00:41 Meri
Yeah, sure, thank you. The Professional Values and Practice module is our first module, and it helps you think about your profession, gets you to think about your experience as a student, as a teacher and as a reflective practitioner. The aim of the module is to get you elaborate and ponder upon your own professional values and your own professional practice and your professional context. We will explore three main topics in this module and all of which will prepare you to respond to the assignment and meet the learning outcomes.
00:01:23 Meri
Modules are designed to complement and enhance the learning and development that you are engaging in whilst on placement on teacher training or in your permanent role or in any of your professional practice and development. The three topics on of the module: the first is exploring professional values and practice. Topic two is strategies for promoting learning and topic three is understanding safe and effective learning environments, so the extra details and everything around the topics alongside the recommended reading, the tutorials, the discussion points or reflective notes are all included in our module content, which you will already have started to familiarize yourself with.
00:02:14 Meri
In the interest of time for this audio tutorial, we will talk about the assignment and hopefully help you around the requirements as well as the learning out codes.
00:02:30 Meri
DL PGCE Professional Values and Practice Assignment Guidance
The assignment is called the reflective report. It’s a standard four-thousand-word essay, and it contains a few main parts as well as an introduction, and conclusion. In the part one you will use your introduction which will talk about what your assignment is about and in part one that is a policy analysis. Sorry in part one, that’s discussion around your professional values. I’m going ahead of myself there. The main and the first part of the assignment is all about your discussion of your profession, teaching on this matter of your experience of your values as a professional and discussion of your professional context. Though this is a sort of a pen portrait, so think of it that way. What we want to learn about is your learning journey.
00:03:35 Meri
Using your journey into teaching so far, we ask you to reflect on how your professional and personal values relate to each other and how are they associated with becoming a teacher. So do share your reflections around what made you choose this profession and what your journey was becoming a teacher. And this will automatically lead you to talking about your context of practice.
00:04:06 Meri
We do get a lot of questions whether your context of practice should necessarily mean your current teaching practice or anything previous. It can be a combination of both. Sometimes when you reflect on your journey and will let you to, your current context, is it inevitable to also discuss previous one or academic background, but you can. You can discuss the previous experience as well and then link it to your current practice.
00:04:39 Meri
And what we mean by discussing the context in practice, it means include the ethos and values associated with the school and where you are currently teaching and your goal of discussion of your professional values should hopefully help you share your reflections as a teacher, as a student, as a practitioner and for us to see your reflections from that what you value, so make sure to not just tell us a story, but reflect around it, so think about the why(s) and your what(s) improvements your professional journey or your professional values have made in your career have made in your teaching?
Do your values as a teacher align with the values of the school you are currently teaching at? If yes, why? Explain why so; we want you to kind of delve into these questions, why and how? What led you to this, passion and we are interested in your story. However, we want to see some good reflections and good critical thinking towards your own practice and towards own practice and profession in general.
That is Part 1. 00:06:12 Alina
DL PGCE Professional Values and Practice Assignment Guidance
Any tips for those who maybe are very new or re-qualifying to become teachers and don’t have vast experience in teaching so far?
00:06:24 Meri
That is a good question, and we do get students that come to us from various professional backgrounds. In that case, you can just reflect why you chose this profession. So instead of just talking about your journey, you can talk about what led you to this profession. It could be a previous academic experience, or it could be a previous profession and you decided to change it, which is very often the case.
00:06:53 Meri
Tell us what made you come to this path? What made you come to PGCE even. If you do not have this bountiful experience in teaching, you can still talk about your reflections, of why, why you decided to enter this profession and then share your reflections around that.
00:07:16 Alina
Yeah, fantastic and Part 2 as you mentioned. 00:07:23 Meri
Part 2 ss policy analysis because in our profession, in our professional context, in the schools that we are working or in the placements that we are teacher training, we do deal with curriculum we do deal with lesson plans and widely we do deal with this umbrella term that we all have to follow, which is policy. For the second part of this assignment is policy analysis. But what we ask you to do is locate a curriculum planning document, a scheme of work that extends over several weeks, so it should not be a single lesson, so it’s not a Lesson plan. It could be an assessment plan, curriculum planning.
00:08:08 Meri
Or a behavior management policy and then identify and critically reflect on a relevant school policy related to teaching and learning in relation to the design and implementation of your chosen curriculum planning.
00:08:26 Meri
And the third part is to critically reflect on the reflectiveness of your chosen curriculum. Simply put, you find a curriculum planning document and then match it against our policy and see how much of what the policy says is happening on a day-to-day basis in your teaching. If it completely matches perfect or critically around the point of improvements and if it does not match again, critically tell why does it not match then? Why are the teachers put under so much pressure to follow certain policies if they do not really correlate with the curriculum?
DL PGCE Professional Values and Practice Assignment Guidance
00:09:10 Meri
And then talk about what steps you take, or the school takes around this, but this is your opportunity to learn. Delve into the wider issues of policy policymakers, curriculum, planning documents, and what their practical implementations are. This is the good combination between theory, what theory tells us in this case, what the policy tells us and practice how it actually is carried out in our team.
Again, we want you to be highly critical and not tell us about the policy and that is not the purpose of it just telling us how that policy works. And if it doesn’t work, why does it not work and what improvements, what developments, what point of reference would you suggest for it?
00:10:04 Meri
So that’s the second part of the assignment, and after that it’s your reflective conclusion where you talk about all sections where you summarize conclusions. In general, are you summarize everything that you have written in part one and Part 2. We always like you to give some future implications and recommendations so do share your critical reflections because that’s important for us to know what your needs are as a teacher. What your thoughts are as a professional and how this can help you further develop your ideas.
Is this at all helpful, Alina? 00:10:49 Alina
Yes, that’s great. Thank you.
Thank you so much for sharing that and to move on I just wanted to ask you what you think would make a good assignment in terms of its structure and in terms of its language.
00:11:08 Meri
We are on a Master’s course and we have our level 7 descriptors, so this means that we expect our students to follow the basic academic writing conventions.
00:11:22 Meri
We want you to write academically and there is plenty of support. Alina provides a lot of academic writing support, so please familiarize yourselves with the academic writing code with academic writing register. Because, as I have mentioned earlier, this is not a storytelling with our critical reflective pieces of work. We also pay attention into your structure.
00:11:50 Meri
Make sure to have cohesive structure. Make sure to have heading, make sure to have page numbers. These are very trivial thing, you might think why mention it, but these are very
DL PGCE Professional Values and Practice Assignment Guidance
important in Master’s level writing, so do pay attention that your assignment is consistent in form, font size is consistent and spacing and that it is consistent with Harvard referencing.
00:12:15 Meri
Writing style, so for all our courses at Leeds Beckett University and for our course as well we use Harvard writing style, so make sure to familiarize with the skills for learning website and ask Alina if you have any questions. Also, module tutors are there if you have any questions or need further guidance.
00:12:35 Meri
We do have a lot of guides that will be there to help you navigate around what Harvard referencing. Make sure that you do not copy and paste chunks of work from various sources are not written by you, because then we deal with plagiarism and make sure you also do not include any previous published work that you have done because that is considered self-plagiarism. And even if you intend to do it, make sure to declare about this and or at least ask for Alina for her guidance.
00:13:11 Alina
Let me know if you need any tips of how to use any previous published work of yours in these current assignments. We don’t want to have any academic misconduct or any issues with plagiarism and self-plagiarism. So yes, in in a nutshell, make sure that your assignment is well written, well structured, with headings, subheadings, paragraphs, linking words, introductions and you can include appendices. We always ask the students to include them. We are quite flexible around this, but if you think that there is something that you want to include, like a Lesson plan or a section from the policy, please do include that in the appendices. It is not counted towards the word count. The word count includes the introduction Part 1, Part 2 and conclusion.
00:14:11 Meri
Anything else will not count towards your word count. References and appendices do not count in the word count, so make sure to check this before submitting and we allow plus or minus 10% of the overall word count, so that is the standard allowance – 10% over the 4000 words or below 10% of 4000 words.
00:14:38 Meri
So do check that your work is consistent, it’s formatted correctly and do not include copy long sections without paraphrasing them without synthesizing them, and without providing a reference to them providing the primary source of that. That is the most important aspect of academic writing.
00:15:04 Alina
DL PGCE Professional Values and Practice Assignment Guidance
Thank you for that, Mary. I think it’s important that we really reflect on this that we need to reference correctly and adhere to the level 7 marking criteria that you can find in the module and all students can find the marketing criteria and descriptors and what we look for and what tutors are going to look for when they mark your work. For further guidance I would really encourage for everybody to get in touch with myself with any academic writing or referencing questions. You can also look at the library tab and there are loads of resources on referencing, they also provide workshops if you can’t attend any of ours. If the timings are not suitable and you can ask for one to one support for myself, and your tutors for the module content in terms of what to write in your assignment. Or bouncing some ideas of each other in the discussions, as Mero said our forums in the MS Teams where you can share your ideas or share your plans in broad terms.
00:16:07 Alina
What are you thinking of discussing around your journey into teaching? Share the ideas. The more we share and discuss our ideas, the more we get to grips of what we have been going through and what has led us to be where we are today in terms of teaching and being teachers in schools. Is there anything else Meri you wanted to say in terms of what you have, support or anything else that I might have missed.
00:16:38 Meri
I think I would just like to add one of the most important parts that we always including our feedback to the students is that sometimes when we asked students to share about something or to write about policy, and the assignment tends to get a sort of a narrative and there’s just too much description. As much as we like your attention to details are the purpose of academic writing is not to be descriptive but be critical. Instead of telling us about something or setting the scene or providing quite unnecessary details, tell us about. Why? Why are you including that thought? Why do you think this is an important topic to discuss? Why do you think this way? So just think of a question why and how rather than what.
00:17:37 Meri
That way you will avoid having been too descriptive, but it will be more analytical, but it will be more critical and of course sometimes analytical. But in that case, make sure you always use references you engaged with literature. When you engage with literature your work will automatically become more critical and if you if you do not, if your assignment lacks certain academic rigor or certain scholarship and literature, then we deal with more of a narrative and more of a description rather than criticality.
00:18:20 Meri
Make sure that you answer you think to yourself why am I writing this? Why is this not important? Why is this concept important? Why are these values important? Why is my professional context
DL PGCE Professional Values and Practice Assignment Guidance
important? Why is this policy import? Or why does this policy not match with the curriculum planning and then ask how can I make improvements in my practice?
00:18:46 Meri
How can I avoid having certain dilemmas at work, how can certain learning theories help me in my profession? When you start asking the questions of why(s) and how s) you will avoid your assignment to be descriptive and that is the focal point of academic writing and the focal point of the course accordingly.
00:19:10 Alina
In terms of literature, there is a broad reading list in each of the modules as well as this module, so please make sure you look there and find a lot of literature to support your ideas, your thoughts, and any concepts that you have come across throughout this module. Please have a look.
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Referencing:
Check the assignment’s template in the module and make sure you give each Appendix a title (1, 2 A, B C etc.). Refer to the Appendices in the text using Harvard Referencing at Leeds Beckett formatting.
Allow time to check the in-text citations and the reference list. Make sure they are formatted in line with the Harvard Referencing at Leeds Beckett guidelines.