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Essay about What is the Role of a Teaching Assistant?

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What is the Role of a Teaching Assistant? What does a Teaching Assistant (TA) do? there are many variations to this role making this not a straight forward question to answer. There are class teaching assistants, Special Educational Needs (SEN) teaching assistants, specialist subject teaching assistants, Higher Level teaching assistants (HLTA’s) to name a few. The job role will differ from school to school as TA’s are present in schools from Early Years classrooms through to senior and upper schools, making the role of a TA an extremely diverse and varied one. “The term ‘teaching assistant’ (TA) is the government’s preferred generic term of reference for all of those in paid employment in support of teachers in primary, special and …show more content…

“Increasingly, teachers and support staff have interchangeable classroom roles, and it is difficult to detect who has which! Although teachers are charged with implementing an exacting national curriculum, teaching assistants (TAs) assume responsibility for helping pupil’s access informal and formal learning. The roles of educators are equally important and must merge collaboratively if pupils are to achieve potential” (Sage,2006, pix) “Differentiation is adopting strategies that ensure success in learning for all, by accommodating individual differences of any kind” (Petty, 2004, p541) To conclude, once the lesson has finished, the TA will provide feedback to the Teacher as to how and what the children learnt, if there were any areas of difficultly or if extension or different strategies were used to help the child learn, if the work was supported by the TA or if their work was independent. Having assessed the children’s work and passed on the relevant information, (this can be passed on verbally or by annotating the planning and by marking the children’s work) the teacher can then reflect effectively, update children’s progress on school monitoring systems and can now plan next steps for each individual child’s learning. Children all learn in different ways therefore the adult teaching needs to be versatile and have a variety of teaching strategies to enable them to assist in any given situation. “If children don’t learn

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