A Journey

As a teacher you should always strive for perfection but be satisfied that it’s always just out of reach. Why? Because teaching is a continual journey of improvement. Your journey will be long and never ending. This journey we are on together will be never ending as we are stepping into a land if continual development. If you become stagnated in your teaching, look to change it up. As you would in your everyday life. Be excited to have the opportunity to improve and decide what that improvement looks like. Be excited that you will have that power to choose.

I have found writing down my experiences with training helpful for me, but my journey is different to those before me and those that will come after me. I hope it will be different for the cohort of 2020/21! This pandemic we are all going through has effected our lives so much. If you are a trainee in 20/21 I assume you had your interview over zoom. Zoom is something I had never heard of before March 2020. We carried out the rest of our Friday training  over the online platform. 30 of us would meet and then struggle to keep on track with our agenda, our course leader was particularly good at keeping us focussed. I think the fact that we were not all in the same room bouncing off each other’s energy helped her greatly.

The power that I have been given on this journey is unlike anything I have ever felt before. I have never felt empowered or passionate about anything I have ever done. If you look up the definition of vocation, I feel that this applies to me when it comes to teaching, but this is also a profession. You cannot just walk in and start to teach.

For the next few blogs I will go through the teacher standards (something you will learn inside out by the end of your journey) but, for this blog, I just wanted to address the feelings that I have gone through on my journey.

 In September, I felt nervous and out of my depth. I felt as if I wasn’t the right person to be able to do this for the rest of my life. I looked at the lesson plans that had been prepared and my head felt like it was exploding with the amount of information that was displayed there. I was wearing a red wide brimmed hat that had “imposter!” embroidered around the brim.

January, my red wide-brimmed had was now just a baseball cap, and on some days I could remove it completely. Now, I had developed an aversion to stepping into a KS4 classroom. When my mentor asked where this aversion had come from, I told her that I didn’t want to “mess up” their exams. She laughed and said that I could always fix any mistakes. My mentor on my 2nd school placement used to say to me “no-one is going to die” or “if no-one dies, it was a good lesson” I laugh about it now, but November me used that as a calming thought!

A colleague of mine had started teaching KS4 since the beginning – which I now feel is a good idea, it’s like the idea of looking at what scares you and doing it anyway.  In term 2 I was getting used to the work life balance and I was beginning to enjoy the reading that came with the lessons planning.

March – years 7, 8 and 9 under my belt. I had found an English teacher forum that was running KS4 CPD that excited me. I was beginning to teach Y10, I had roughly 2 weeks under my belt. My red baseball cap was now, metaphorically stuck in the boot of my car, under the kids carry potty that we take on long dog walks.

What I want to make clear is that I do not feel that I have missed out on any training at all. The only thing that I have missed out on is the practice of being on the stage that is being the teacher in the classroom. I think the ‘beauty’ of my situation is that all the other teachers  have been on minimal timetables (part time, or not in school at all) and they may be feeling nerves. My mentor, in all her knowledge said to me that she feels nervous after the summer holidays and she has been teaching since the early 00s.

Read this blog and use it as you will. I want you to understand that someone before you has been on this journey and survived it. Teaching is life changing. I think it is also fair to say that the year 2020 is life changing for us all too.

The People You Meet..

The People You Meet While Teaching…  

In your ITT year you will meet at lot of fantastic teachers, you mentor will have years in the classroom under their belt. You will see that fantastic RQT that strides in and out of the staffroom, taking everything in their stride, setting up clubs and running sessions every night after school. You will sit there in awe looking at them, talking to SLT and middle leaders as if they have been teaching as long as they have. Their enthusiasm will be never ending, they will seem not to stop and love every moment of it.

Or, you will have a head of department who came into teaching at the same point in their life as you have yours. Who will have a warm and infectious laugh, who will pop in on your lessons and check that you are ok. Or will cover for you for 10 minutes while you pop and get some resources you left downstairs. They do not bat an eye lid, while you are worrying that everyone can see you have only been doing this for months. This head of department is the same person who is your cheer leader and has every faith that you will be a fantastic teacher and laugh when you share your fears and say that they had the same too. Your mentor will mention, in an off hand comment, that they love teaching as they “know who I am when I am in my classroom” that comment will hit you so hard that you scrawl it in permanent marker on your bookcase so you see it every morning when you are getting ready for the day.

If the match is right, you will become the biggest fan of your mentor. They will spend time with you. Not all they say will be easy to hear, but you will learn to value that critical eye as that is what makes you great. That is what teaches you to be reflective and take ownership for your actions. Taking ownership for your pedagogy and how you approach your lessons is so important as you are learning that you are directly affecting the young people you see every day.

There may be a teacher who had a reputation that you have heard of before you even meet them. They will be “famous” amongst trainees for their drive and motivation, but also for the way they look, and they will prove to you that looks can be deceiving. They will be the most approachable person you will ever meet. They will actively show an interest in your training and look over your shoulder to offer advice on your lessons, even though your subject is opposite to yours. You will value that time that other teachers give you. You will quickly learn that time, as a teacher, is the most valuable thing you will ever have, and to have spare time to help another is amazing.

You will start to miss the kids you teach.  There will be that cheeky boy in year 7, who knows’ he is being a bit cheeky with you, but he is harmless, and after some gentle goading, he does engage. All he wants is to make you laugh. Or there will be the twins in your Monday morning class, who don’t look anything like each other, but they sometimes catch you unaware and you address them by the wrong name and you get a knowing look and an eye roll. There will be year 11 boys who will appear as if by magic when you need a box of heavy books carrying to another classroom. Or the year 7 boy who needs to be reminded to be quiet to give himself time to think, or just everyone else a break from his constant running commentary.

Your world will become so much bigger. The people you meet will help you with your knowledge and help you shape the type of teacher you will be. Through them, you will feel like you have been given the key to a place that only a special kind of person is permitted entrance to. Granted, this place has some dark places and times you feel like you are hitting you head against a brick wall. The work will never feel like it has been finished, you will become a perfectionist. But the people in this weird teacher-secret-garden will be so excited to have you there. They will lift you up and carry you on their shoulders. They will make you excited to have the opportunity to be someone else’s cheerleader.

The people you meet while teaching, will change you. The people you meet while teaching will help you become the better you. The teacher you.

What is Well-being?

By the time you have found my voice reader, I hope that the unprecedented situation that the UK is in has passed, or, is beginning to come to an end. Schools shut on Friday 20th March, just as my SCITT colleagues and I were getting ready to go on our SEND placement the week before the Easter Holidays. I felt confident about this as I come from an SEN background and I was keen to see SEND education from a teachers perspective rather than the ETA view I had come from.        

                Everyone was feeling very uncertain about what was going to happen, right until it did. Sitting in the staff room at my placement school, it felt like the wave of school closures was creeping slowly across the European continent toward our little island. I heard of trainees on university courses getting told to go to campus rather than their placement schools. The planned college interviews for our Y11 were cancelled and re-arranged twice, before eventually being cancelled for good. As a department, we pulled together. Many of the experienced teachers around me were beginning to share resources and plans they had made or had used previously with success. I felt pride in being part of profession that is so willing to share knowledge, wealth and resources.

                When BoJo made the announcement, it felt like we all let out a collective sigh, at least now we knew what we were planning for. At the time it was “only” a 3-week closure before review. Reader, as I sit at my kitchen table writing this, we are approaching week 6. As I went into school on the Thursday, it was all hands-on deck, we knew what to do and how to do it. I can tell you that year 11 were at the front of our minds. It feels as if the end of their career in education (for those that don’t go on to further education) was cruelly ripped from under their feet and they have been left in a kind of limbo. There were many simple questions that we could not answer, the first and most prominent still is “What now?”

                Reader, I share this experience with you as I, as well as many other ITTs in the UK, are in the same boat as the Year 11 cohort of 2019/2020. But I can assure you, was great certainty, that we are not concerned with our outcomes. As teachers, as that is what we are essentially, we are concerned for Year 11 and what they do now.

                The way that I have experienced my ITT year is vastly different from yours, as I have said previously, it belongs to me. I am so proud to call 2019/2020 my training year. I have grown so much as a person and into the teacher I only dreamt I would become. A big part of that is being coached (right from our induction meeting on 12th July 2019) to look out for our own well-being and being shown how to do that. I have mentioned the experience we are currently going through as I feel it is important for everyone to look out for their mental health at weird times such as this as well as when things are back to normal, whatever that looks like for you and whenever that will be for us all.

                If someone were  to ask me, what well-being is, or what it looks like. I would tell them that it is something that is personal to you as an individual. But to generalise, it is all about awareness. Self-awareness; if you can learn about what makes you tick, your likes and dislikes you are on to a winner. But, if you can be reflective and really look at yourself, you will go far. I have learnt to reflect upon the affect that I have on those around me, how I can have different types of reactions from people according to how I approach them and the situation. Remember that we are around young people all day and they are at a stage in their lives where they are still working out their place in the world, and what they really think of the culture around them. It is up to us as an adult figure in their lives to present a well rounded individual.

                What I have mentioned above, I will cover in later blog posts where I plan to cover each of the teacher standards. To come in a circle toward the end of this post, I want to give you some tips on looking out for your well-being during your ITT year.

  1. Take time – get to know what you really like doing (that isn’t school, or work focused)
  2. Talk – to your partner, family, friends. Share what you are going through, vent your frustrations.
  3. Celebrate – Celebrate your successes, celebrate meeting deadlines! There will be many. Celebrate things that do not go so well!
  4. Reflect – teaching is a reflective profession and this, in itself, forces you to become self-aware, but remember those light-bulb moments where you have had a break through about yourself and hold on that that light bulb.

2 – Advice for New Trainees

I have been wondering about the best way to approach this blog to ensure that I take it in the right direction for people that are just starting their teacher training, or for those further along in their careers that are just taking on a new tutee. Therefore, it is important for you, reader, to be aware that the experiences that I share on here are unique to me. Others may have experienced the same, or similar to me. Some of you may be able to empathise with what I share. You may wonder whether you will come upon the experience that I share. If you do, it is a happy coincidence that you can read this for support, but if you don’t please don’t think that you are doing anything “wrong” or you are missing out on something in your training year. Just as my year belongs to me and my experience, your year will belong entirely to you, so firstly, good luck!

To begin with, I thought I would put together a “Top Ten List” of pieces of advice that have been given to me, or that I think may be of use to those starting their training in 2020/2021. Take this as you see fit, and I am sure your mentors and colleagues will share their experience and advice with you. This list is in no particular order.

  • Find Headspace – your training year will be intense, there will be a lot of demands of your time and if you are anything like me, you will worry about what to do first and when to do it. I recommend that you find something you enjoy doing that benefits you and your mental and physical health. Find something that will clear your head of anything school or training related. Schedule this into your working week. A lot of teachers that I have met this year attend gym classes regularly, even if it is a 60minute session a week. You will find yourself looking forward to it. I have also had many “light-bulb” moments about planning or a university essay that have happened when I was doing something entirely unrelated to teaching.
  • Build Strong Boundaries – When I started in September, I was prepared for the work that comes with teaching English. I was also aware, that if I let it, it could creep in and take over every aspect of my life. I am a mum with 3-year-old twins, and I do not want them becoming used to seeing mummy on a laptop all the time. So, the first thing that I decided to stick to was that I will not work when the kids are awake, and I do not work on Friday nights. I have stuck by this and it has worked. You could also put boundaries in place when you are at school, always make sure you make time to have a lunch break. Step away from your desk or classroom and take 20 minutes to breath and relax and have something to eat. Your colleagues will respect this and you will find that a lot of them do it too.
  • Ask Questions –  Your mentor will be prepared for this, (they wouldn’t be a mentor if they weren’t aware of the amount of questions a trainee asks!), ask them about their motivation, why they have approached a lesson in  certain way, or how they manage their work/life balance. I always make a point of asking new colleagues how long they have been teaching and what their career journey has been to lead them to this point. You will learn a lot about teaching through asking questions. Ask for feedback, ask them how they would teach your lesson. You will get a lot of this through observations; but there is also opportunity for it through lessons that are not formally observed. If you are lucky enough to be placed in a school with an outward facing SLT team, ask them about the school, ask them about policies and why the school approaches things in certain ways. You will learn whether the school matches your personal beliefs and ethics. You will learn what type of school you want to start your career in.
  • Observe – I could not recommend this more! There will be time on your timetable that will allow you to go and observe others. You will so much about how your colleagues manage behaviour and build relationships with the kids. A good way to do this is to pick a child that you may find difficult to manage and follow their timetable. If anything, this will give you confidence that you are not the problem. I also find it interesting to observe subjects that I do not teach or are “opposite” to mine (Maths, for example). It is fascinating and you will become a fan of the wealth of subject knowledge your colleagues have. You can also “magpie” lesson ideas or strategies that will work in your lesson. It is a great opportunity to build relationships with your colleagues around school too, as an English teacher I hold History teachers close to my heart because of all the contextual information they can give me about the time period in which a piece of text was written.
  • Read – JOIN TWITTER #edutwitter #tinyvoiceuesday #ITTchat. To name a few. There is so much out there. Teaching is about sharing best practice, resources and experiences. Teachers also write, look for published works around your subject. Twitter is a good place to find them, as teachers will share books, they have found helpful. Reading is also a powerful tool in increasing your subject knowledge. Your mentors will know of useful articles or journals for you to read. Start building a bank. I can tell you; Amazon loves me with the amount of books that I have bought this year.
  • Friendships – I mentioned this in my first blog. If you are on a school centred course, you will quickly build fast and strong friendships. These people will quickly become the most valuable things in your life. They will become your safe space, sounding board or even the ones that bring you back down to earth. You will be able to see yourself through their eyes and admit to short comings or have a laugh about your day. When I met my English trainee colleagues, we set up a WhatsApp group on day one and I can honestly say that there has not been a day that they have not  messaged. A good group of friends is like the sun when you are in the depths of marking or reading Shakespeare.  
  • To Do Lists – I had trail and error with these. You should experiment with how you keep track of what you need to do, but I do recommend writing everything down. It then gets it out of your head and you can get a sense of satisfaction when you cross things off.
  • TIME – As a teacher, this is such a valuable resource. You will learn to manage it as you go, but a few things to be aware of: Have a routine; have a time that you get up and go to bed. Ensure that your classes are ready to go when the bell goes: it does not matter if they are standing up waiting, you can use this time to do a few retrieval questions about the lesson you have just done with them. Allocate time to plan: as a trainee this is a slow process (think: you are building up a bank of lessons that you can edit and reuse). Do not spend hours and hours on planning as your mentor is there to help. Time for yourself: as I have said before, you need to allocate time to be yourself, do not let this consume you.
  • Experience – your training year is the most reflective, demanding journey you will ever complete. You will look back with pride at what you have complete and your heart will swell with pride at the sense of accomplishment. ENJOY it, your training year is the safest point in your career, it is your time to take risks and work out what type of teacher you are. I feel whole since training to teach. You will too.
  • Fun – Teachers are a funny breed of human. A lot of us can still connect with the child that we used to be. Some of us are in the profession to make sure that children have a better experience than we did. The child is at the centre of everything we do. Because of this, we spend a lot of time with them. One thing that you will learn quickly is that kids are hilarious! They will make you laugh in ways you have not before, they will get you to look at the world around you through their eyes, which is fascinating. Teaching is privileged position, have fund with it. In some cases, for kids in your class, you are the highlight of their day. Who can say that? We make the days of the young minds around us.

There you go, my list of “advice” for those starting their training this year. Do you have any questions or comments? Leave them below and  I will get back to you.

1 – Welcome!

My name is Meg, I am 32 and I am a trainee English teacher. I have always felt that I could write a book – isn’t there a saying out there that everyone has a book in them? When I was a teenager, I used to write pages and pages of fantasy writing, involving angels and time travelling. Then, I went through a phase of creating a character that was a younger version of Bridget Jones; none of my ideas were entirely original.

Then, in my early twenties, when I was working in a call centre, I met a woman who wrote a column for a magazine. She told me to write about what is true to me and that stuck with me. I was advised to observe the people and world around me and, being my mothers daughter (someone who has often been told to be quiet or is the life of the party, without a drink in her) that was a hard lesson to learn. But learn it I did. I stopped trying to write things that I thought people would want to read and wrote for myself instead. I found keeping a journal was a good way of keeping my appetite for putting pen to paper satisfied (then I met a significant other, who snooped, read them and then burnt them – mum was furious!). I spent years writing for me and keeping the notebooks, scraps of paper and even notes on my phone entirely for me. I got married, had babies and was in jobs that were just a means to put food on the table. My habit of always writing things down and making notes subsided (parenting is kind of all-consuming isn’t it?!)

Then I started teacher training.

I can honestly say that I have never in my entire life met a bunch of genuine hilarious people. There are 35 of us and we all look forward to Fridays where we can spend our days together. I am on a SCITT (school centred initial teacher training) course, we spend Monday – Thursday in school and then Fridays are at ‘uni’ where we complete training that helps us with our pedagogy (I see it as the theory side of teaching). We range in age and life experience and I feel that we compliment each other to the best of our abilities. Our course director is fantastic – she is approachable (literally at the end of the phone all day everyday), meaning the support we get is invaluable. I won’t say too much yet as she hasn’t seen my blog!  

I always wanted to be a teacher – I had a Magic Weaver (Google it) who was an English teacher and he empowered me to believe that I am a writer. I was in Year 9 when the Twin Towers attack happened and I wrote a piece about it from the point of view of a little boy sitting on the shoulders of his father and my English teacher read it out to the class, I remember him being so proud of me my chest swelled with pride. He also gave me books to read outside of what we were studying and spent time after school to talk to me about them.  He was firm with me though, I remember turning in a piece of homework in Year 11 that I’d completed the night before, he could tell, and he was so disappointed in me. I still have that ground-swallow me up feeling whenever I think about it.

So, this leads me to now – I finally have something that I want to write about and (I think) others want to read about. I want this blog to be a platform for other trainees in my position. I will write about experiences that I have had in my training year and then those that I have in my NQT year and beyond. I think reading this will be a good tool for teachers further along in their career too as it will give them an insight into what trainees and early year teachers are going through (it still takes me a while to write a lesson plan, whereas my partner told me they can change their plan on the spot depending on the “feel” of the class on the day!).

 A few ground rules that I feel I should set out at the beginning:

  • This will be a professional platform; I won’t share my private life. Views expressed are entirely  my own.
  • I will not mention any colleagues, schools or companies by name unless I have explicit permission
  • I do not represent any school, education provider or company.