Health and Safety in the Wood Technology room

Health and safety must be prioritized before anything else when using a variety of hand tools, power
tools, and machinery. When an adult uses a machine, power tool, or hand tool, they are primarily
responsible for their own safety. In a school environment, the teacher oversees the student's safety
when they enter a classroom, whether it be the Wood Technology room, the Home Economics room, or
the Science lab. From the first class, the teacher must clearly explain the various health and safety
procedures that must be followed in the classroom. When a student enters a teacher's classroom, it is
the responsibility of the teacher to ensure the student's safety. That student's parents must have faith in
your ability to supervise and protect their child in the classroom. From my reading of the Teaching
Council Code for Professional Conduct, it states “Teachers’ relationships with pupils/students,
colleagues, parents, school management and the public are based on trust”.

Early in the week, I noticed that some of my first-year Wood Technology students had demonstrated a
poor understanding of health and safety when using hand tools. Some students were seating down
when using a tenon saw, others had their hands in front of the cutting edge on various hand tools, and
others were working in a dangerous environment, whether it was by leaving their school bags in the
middle of the floor or not having their chairs underneath their tables. I had to constantly remind the
students of the various health and safety protocols when using hand tools throughout the class.

At the end of this class, I was physically and mentally exhausted. Before departing home at the end of
school, I decided to speak with my cooperating teacher about the situation in class today. I wanted to
know if something like this had ever happened in his class, and if so, what he did next. After a lengthy
conversation with the cooperating teacher, he informed me that he had several classes like mine today
when he first started teaching. After hearing this I was quite relieved. He emphasized to me that it
regularly happens for students to grasp all the theory, for example how to operate a tenon saw but
forget what they have to do when it is time to put the theory into practice.

My co-operating teacher advised me to start with the class again just as if the next class would be their
first-class using hand tools. When it was time for the next class, I told the students that I was
disappointed by what I had seen in the previous class. I asked the students why they thought I was
disappointed by what I had seen. Straight away some students identified that they didn’t follow the
correct protocol when using various hand tools. After speaking with the students, I was delighted that
they could identify that they had used various hand tools dangerous. There was a lot of repetition in this
class of previous classes. Kim, Y., Kang, S., Yun, H., Kim, B., Choi, B. (2020) state that
“repetition benefitted syntactic complexity and the accuracy of target features”. The students were well
able to answer my questions and I also got a few of the students to give their peers a demonstration of
how to use various hand tools. I believe by getting the students to watch their peers give a
demonstration was a good way for the students to learn, as they could identify different mistakes their
peers were making and different things they were doing right.

 The Teaching Council. (2016) Code of Professional Conduct for Teachers: 2nd Edition code-
of-professional-conduct-for-teachers1.pdf (teachingcouncil.ie)
 Kim, Y., Kang, S., Yun, H., Kim, B., Choi, B. (2020) The Role of Task Repetition Korean as a
Foreign Language Classroom: Writing Quality, Attention to Form, and Learning of Korean
Grammar. Foreign Language Annals.