Teaching & Education Revision — City College Norwich Qualifications QCF
Complete City College Norwich Qualifications QCF Teaching & Education specification revision resources. Tailored syllabus coverage with topic breakdowns, quizzes, and practice questions.
Specification Topics
- Values, context and definition of supported employment
- Personal reflection for improving practice
- Identification of training and informing strategies
- Recording the trainee’s progress
- Analysing the task to be trained
- Practice in task preparation techniques
- Using TSI techniques for a practical activity
- Understand topographical and functional correctness and judgement and discreet steps in a task
- Presenting information in an accessible way
- The role of the trainer in managing underachievement
Top Exam Board Tips
- When discussing historical context, structure your answer around distinct phases (e.g., institutional era, deinstitutionalisation, community inclusion) and critically evaluate their impact.
- Use concrete examples to link SRV to practice: for instance, describe how a supported employment job coach uses feedback to enhance a worker's social competence and perceived value.
- In assignments, explicitly reference Marc Gold's 'Try Another Way' approach and how TSI has evolved, such as the use of natural cues and self-management strategies.
- Ensure you can apply the concepts of vocational profiling and job matching to a case study, demonstrating how you would identify job preferences, skills, and support needs.
- Prepare to discuss TSI as a flexible methodology—explain how fading and task analysis can be adjusted for learners with different support requirements.
- Use a structured reflective model (such as Gibbs or Kolb) to frame your self-evaluation, ensuring you move beyond description to deep analysis and planning.
- When gathering feedback, use a mix of methods (e.g., observation notes, questionnaires, verbal feedback) and always reference these sources in your reflective account to demonstrate triangulation.
- Present your SMART plan as a table or clear list, and cross-reference each goal back to a specific area for improvement identified in your self-evaluation or feedback analysis.
- When describing assistance, always link it to the learner's stage in the training cycle.
- Use specific examples to illustrate the prompting hierarchy and how you would fade support.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Confusing supported employment with sheltered workshops or day programmes, failing to recognise the core requirement of competitive, integrated community employment.
- Misinterpreting Social Role Valorisation as solely about independence, rather than about enhancing social image and competence to enable valued roles.
- Treating vocational profiling and job matching as a one-off administrative task, rather than an ongoing, collaborative process that adapts to changing circumstances.
- Overlooking the importance of systematic instruction in the job matching process, assuming that good job matches alone ensure success without considering the need for structured on-the-job training.
- Assuming that TSI is only relevant for people with severe disabilities, instead of understanding its principles as a continuum of support that can be tailored to varying levels of need.
- Providing a superficial self-evaluation that only describes general feelings (e.g., 'I felt the session went well') without objective analysis of specific teaching behaviours or learner outcomes.
- Collecting feedback but failing to synthesise it into actionable insights; merely attaching testimony without explaining how it contributes to reflective learning.
- Setting goals that lack one or more SMART elements—often goals are too vague (e.g., 'improve my instruction') or lack a defined timeframe or measurement criteria.
Key Terminology & Definitions
- Understand the level and type of service provision for people with a learning disability from a historical perspective, Understand the basic values of the community integration and inclusion movements underpinned by Social Role Valorisation (SRV) principles, Understand the potential role that supported employment can play in Social Role Valorisation, Understand the principles and procedures that characterise the supported employment approach, Understand the importance of vocational profiling and job matching in relation to successful outcomes, Understand how TSI is aimed at those with the severest levels of disability and how it can be generalised to those with lesser support needs, Understand the historical significance of the contribution made by Marc Gold to TSI and identify some of the advances made since then
- Know how to self-evaluate own practice, identifying and reflecting on strengths and weaknesses and identifying future improvements, Gather feedback from tutors and others with experience of delivering TSI in practice, Know how to develop a plan for future practice based on SMART principles
- Hands-on Assistance Types
- Prompting Hierarchy and Intrusiveness
- Fading Support
- Timing and Stages of Assistance
- Learned Helplessness Prevention
- Reinforcement and Feedback Strategies
- Understand the importance of recording initiation in relation to skill acquisition, Understand the importance of recording data with regard to the trainee’s progress on the task, Understand the importance of setting criterion
- Know how to identify the different routines that exist in a job, Know the importance of organising information and breaking the task down in a natural way by observation, Understand the relationship between each step of a task, Understand through practice how to organise linear and non-linear task analyses, Understand how health and safety relates to task analysis
- Understand the importance of learning a task according to the natural method, Understand the importance of adhering to the TSI method
- Know how to train the task according to the TSI method with a person with a learning disability, Be able to review and critically appraise training and reflect on alternative strategies for improvement, Be able to plot the learning curves of the trainees on the task in terms of skill acquisition and self-initiation, Understand the potential of trainees to acquire complex practical skills given training appropriate to their needs
- Understand the importance of learning and training the task in a topographically correct manner, Be able to identify the difference between discreet and judgment steps and their relevance for training preparation
- Understand that there are many different information systems and that the ability to access them depends on each person’s ability to interpret the information they contain, Understand that even those with the severest levels of disability can access complex information systems if organised and presented efficiently, Understand that the ability to interpret and access different information systems depends upon previous experience and exposure
- Understand the effect of this on people with learning disabilities who have a history of failure, low societal expectations and deskilling and the responsibilities of the trainer, Understand that people learn at different rates and that this can plateau or temporarily regress during learning, Understand the concept of errorless learning