Teaching Assistants (TAs) play a huge role in a child’s learning and development, and many times are spending one-to-one or small group time with children. While TAs work closely with teachers in schools, they have a very unique role to play.
We are interested in teaching assistants’ experience and views of supporting children’s agency in the classroom by using talk invitations and activities that are adapted from the TRAIL programme.
We conducted two online workshops working with pairs of TAs and classroom teachers, where we introduced the talk invitations and provided examples & activities for the TAs to try out in their practice. We implemented the Plan-Do-Review framework (shown below) to help TAs plan, implement, and review/reflect on the talk invitation strategy they chose. Finally, we conducted interviews the TAs to understand their experience and attitudes towards using the strategies.
