Task Breakdown

The tasks

Tasks 1 to 3 require you to outline and evaluate your experiences of working within everyday
school classroom routines: first with an individual pupil, second with a small group, and third
with a whole class.

Task 4 gives you an opportunity to look at five situations or events that provide evidence for
standards not already fully covered in your first three tasks. These usually relate to your wider
professional experiences and responsibilities, for example:
? working with pupils, teachers and other adults inside and outside the classroom
? helping to supervise pupils in the playground
? assisting in educational visits, and
? participating in professional meetings and working parties.

Once all the tasks have been completed, you should have provided evidence for all of the standards.
You should also have identified the source of supporting evidence held in school ? either
documentary evidence or witness testimony.
You should start to think about potential situations/events for task 4 at the same time as planning
your first three tasks. It is important that you have made provisional decisions about these
situations/events so that these can be reviewed later on in the preparation process. From the outset,
then, you should be keeping an eye open for situations that you could potentially use.

Supporting evidence
You will need to provide evidence to support your assessment tasks, though this should be generated
through normal work activity and should be directly related to the tasks.
Your provider of preparation will help you to identify the range of documentary evidence that is
permissible, such as:
? samples of pupils? work
? lesson plans
? assessment sheets
? reports
? planning sheets
? case studies
? certificates for training
? letters/cards of endorsement/thanks
? witness statements
? observation notes
? meeting agendas/minutes/notes
? classroom resources
? audits of resources.
It is important to bear in mind that any documentary evidence you provide is for the purpose of
assuring the assessor that you meet the HLTA standards.
Under normal circumstances, you are likely to find it easier if your chosen activities are relatively fresh
in your mind. It is important to bear in mind that the evidence will be reviewed by the assessor on
the school visit and you may be asked about it in more detail. The evidence can, of course, be based
on your current work, but it may also be retrospective. If one or more tasks are based on previous
work or experience, it should normally fall within the past 12 months. The reason for permitting you
to draw upon evidence over the previous 12 months is that some relevant activities with which you
are involved may be seasonal or annual, such as school trips. Bear in mind that you must have
evidence to support a past activity; and, if the evidence includes the oral (or written) testimony of
a teacher, it follows that that teacher should still be available for corroboration if required.

Breakdown of Tasks.


Task 1:Working with an individual pupil

In this task you will need to demonstrate:
? how you worked with the teacher to plan your contribution
? your own planning for the work
? how you carried out the work, and
? how you evaluated your personal learning.
The specific example that you select for this task will depend upon the needs of the pupil concerned
and on your own area of expertise ? such as literacy, science, special educational needs (SEN),
modern languages or an age range.
Once you have identified an appropriate example, you will need to:
? complete the response sheet for task 1
? keep a copy of all relevant documents, including your planning and your contribution to the
assessment of the pupil, and
? complete appropriate parts of your assessment grid


Task 2:Working with a small group

In this task you will need to demonstrate:
? how you worked with the teacher to plan your contribution
? your own planning for the work
? how you carried out the work, and
? how you evaluated your personal learning.
Once again, the specific example that you select will depend upon the needs of the pupils concerned
and on your own area of expertise. Normally, a small group will be three or more pupils, but in some
circumstances a pair would be acceptable, depending on the context in which you work.
Once you have identified an appropriate example, you will need to:
? complete the response sheet for task 2
? keep a copy of all relevant documents, including your planning and your contribution to the
assessment of the pupils, and
? complete appropriate parts of your assessment grid


Task 3:Working with a whole class

In this task you will need to demonstrate:
? how you worked with the teacher to plan your contribution
? your own planning for the work
? how you carried out the work, and
? how you evaluated your personal learning.
As with tasks 1 and 2, the specific example that you select will depend upon the needs of the pupils concerned, and on your own area of expertise. For an interpretation of ?whole class?, you should consult the handbook Guidance to the standards. ?Whole class? is not defined by an absolute or precise number of pupils or students. The size of a whole class will be determined by the context in which you work; for example, class sizes in special schools and sixth form settings may be very
different from those in primary and secondary settings.What defines whole-class activities is your role in introducing, managing and completing a topic or task, and the degree and complexity of the organisation and management of learning and behaviour within relatively large groups of pupils or students with diverse needs. However, in settings where ?whole class? is usually taken to mean an individual learner ? for example, a pupil referral unit (PRU) ? there is still a requirement for you to
demonstrate you have the skills to support learning in a larger group. If this is not possible within
your setting, your regional provider of assessment or local authority may be able to arrange a placement in another setting where it would be possible for you to demonstrate this standard.
You will notice that standard
3.3.5 requires you to demonstrate that you can work with a whole class
without the assigned teacher being present.While you must be able to do this, and will need to demonstrate that you have met this standard at some point in the assessment process, it is not necessary that the assigned teacher is absent for the situation you describe in task 3. It might be sensible, for example, to use task 4 to describe a situation in which you led an activity while the teacher was elsewhere. Once you have identified an appropriate example, you will need to:

? complete the response sheet for task 3
? keep a copy of all relevant documents, including your planning and your contribution to the
assessment of the pupils, and
? complete appropriate parts of your assessment grid


Task 4
For the fourth task, you are asked to analyse five situations or events that you have encountered.
Some may have taken place recently; others may take place while you are on the programme.
These short accounts should not be a minute-by-minute description of activities, nor are they expected to be a substantial essay that includes detailed evidence. Rather, each should be a series of
notes that summarise your reflections on situations that made you think about what happened, why it happened and the nature of your own involvement. The length of the ?entry? on the response sheet for each of the five situations or events is likely to be between 300 and 500 words, but this is guidance rather than a rule. You should spend between 45 and 60 minutes writing up your notes on each of the five situations or events.
So what would count as relevant situations or events?

There are two issues that you should consider
First, you should choose situations or events that enable you to demonstrate the standards and, in particular, those standards that you have been unable to reflect fully in the first three tasks. For example, you may find that it is through your analysis of these situations that you can clearly show your professional values and practice as set out in section 1 of the standards. Second, you should remember that your chosen situations or events should typically relate to routine encounters in your school. They do not have to relate to dramatic or extraordinary events.
They may, of course, refer to challenging situations you have encountered, but in all circumstances your assessor will be interested in your observations on typical professional issues rather than your
experience in handling crises. The situations may involve not only children and young people, but also teachers and/or other adults, including parents. They can relate to circumstances outside the classroom, elsewhere in the school and/or activities outside school. If they do take place outside the school, they must be part of the school?s curricular or extra-curricular provision and be managed by
the school.
In selecting relevant situations or events, you should consider how best to demonstrate the
HLTA standards. You should refer to the handbook Guidance to the standards to help you identify suitable situations.
The kind of learning points that you identify are entirely dependent on the situations or events you have observed or experienced. In selecting your situations/events, however, you should think carefully about the evidence available to support your analysis of each. The range and amount of evidence for some situations or events may be less substantial than is available for tasks 1?3, but there must be some corroborative evidence, which could include the oral testimony of a class teacher and/or
the headteacher.
As you complete the response sheets for task 4 (F4, F5, F6, F7 and F9 you are asked to note the following
?Brief description? means just that. This section is not the place on the form to discuss in detail your reflections about the events that took place and the reasons why something happened. It might simply say: ?During morning playtime, two children got into a dispute about such-and-such and I had to intervene?; or ?During literacy hour I noticed that such-and-such child?s behaviour was out of character and I had to decide what to do?.
The section headed ?Analysis? is the place where you explain what occurred and why, how this involved you, what decisions you may have had to make, and any outcomes of the situation.
In the section headed ?Learning points?, you should comment on what you learned from the situation. For some situations, you may be able to pinpoint either what you did well or whether you would have handled things differently. In others, you may be able to identify a way of dealing with a situation that is transferable to other situations. But, as is emphasised above, the kind of learning points that you raise will be entirely dependent on the situations or events that you have observed
or experienced. Once you have identified your five situations or events, you will need to:
? complete the five response sheets for task 4
? keep a copy of all relevant documents, and
? complete appropriate parts of your assessment grid