The Teaching Assistant's Guide to Effective Interaction How to maximise your practice

The Teaching Assistant?s Guide to Effective Interaction is the definitive guide to teaching assistant-pupil interaction and an invaluable professional development tool for classroom support staff and the teachers who work with them. The authors? research and development work with schools has highlighted the need for specific, practical guidance on the role of the teaching assistant.

This highly practical and accessible book sets out a role for teaching assistants that focuses on developing pupils? independence and ownership of learning. Based on a classroom-tested framework, and covering the main contexts in which teaching assistants work, it includes practical strategies and reflective activities to help you improve the support you provide to pupils in everyday settings. This book will help you to:

• Improve your interactions with pupils
• Understand the principles behind effective classroom talk
• Carefully scaffold pupils? learning
• Work effectively in collaboration with teachers
• Support the Assessment for Learning process
• Support group work and collaborative tasks
• Deliver intervention programmes.

This book is an essential read for all teaching assistants. It will also be of interest to school leaders, SENCos and teachers, in both primary and secondary schools, who wish to improve their use of teaching assistants and their own interactions with pupils.

1. The teaching assistant as scaffolder  2. The value of planning the right task and pupils taking an active role in interactions  3. The principles of scaffolding  4. Scaffolding strategies  5. Assessment for learning: Providing valuable feedback for teachers and pupils  6. Promoting effective group work  7. Delivering intervention programmes

Paula Bosanquet is Head of Subject for Education and Development at the Cass School of Education and Communities, University of East London, UK

Julie Radford is Senior Lecturer in Special and Inclusive Education at the UCL Institute of Education, London, UK

Rob Webster is a Researcher at the UCL Institute of Education, London, UK and co-author of Maximising the Impact of Teaching Assistants.