This blog is Part 1 of 2.
The aim is to give you an insight, at this early stage of your career, into the most important aspects of day-to-day life as a trainee teacher, other than teaching and learning.
We’ll start with practicalities.
Practical Matters
Schools are fantastic places to work.
They vary greatly and one of the challenges facing a trainee teacher is deciding what type of school they would like to work in.
I will leave that challenge to you, though, as here my intention is to give a crash course in some of the practical matters – both large and small – that come with working in a school.
First, we have geography.
You need to be able to find your way around.
This can be more complex than it sounds.
Some schools are labyrinthine, particularly secondaries, often due to historical building works that have taken place periodically, leading to a structure lacking coherent planning.
On beginning your training, you should spend a little time finding your way around.
This will make your life much easier further down the road.
Don’t be afraid to roam the corridors if you have a free lesson.
Wandering round will help you to get your bearings.
If you fear being pulled up for not working, carry a piece of paper with you – it is a sure-fire method for making it look like there is a deeper purpose to your wanderings!
Identify key sections of the school
- Departments (secondary) or Year Groups (primary)
- Toilets
- Reception
- Offices
- Staff Room
- Photocopiers
- Entrances and exits
If the option is available, ask someone to give you a tour – this could be learners as well as staff.
Having assessed the lay of the land, make sure you quickly find out where resources are kept, how photocopying is accessed and how to log on to the computer system.
This is all basic stuff with which I’m sure you will be familiar.
I mention it here as much out of a sense of completeness as anything else.
Next is familiarising yourself with the school day.
This is vital, not least so you can ensure you are forever punctual and have a clear understanding of how much time is available in between the various things you are expected to do or attend.
Rules are next – those covering learners and those covering staff.
The former includes the school’s behaviour policy.
Having a sound understanding of the rules will make life in the classroom much easier.
Learners will soon work out whether you know your stuff or not.
Rules for staff are usually brief and often cover basics like dress code, expected attendance at meetings, car parking and the like.
Getting a swift grasp on these will ensure you meet them and don’t end up in an embarrassing situation in which someone has to direct you as to the appropriate way to act.
Unwritten rules are important as well.
For example, do learners and staff maintain generally formal or informal greetings, are briefings held in the staff room on a Monday, and is it seen as bad form to ‘cc’ line managers into non-urgent emails?
The aim here is to think about the norms that underpin social interaction in the school.
Picking up on these and working in conjunction with them will make people positively disposed towards you (which, in turn, will deliver the general benefit of making your training more enjoyable).
Other practical matters to consider include familiarising yourself with the school’s software (what do they use to take the register? Is there a virtual learning environment?), procedures for getting in and out of the building, when the building opens and closes, as well as any relevant information about the local area.
The wider point here is that, when embarking on your training, you will be entering a functioning institution filled with people, rules, norms and systems.
Getting on top of this as soon as possible will make your life easier and allow you to focus on teaching and learning.
The Curriculum
The curriculum is our next port of call, neatly combining the practical with the pedagogical.
You will be expected to teach lessons that tally with the curriculum your training school is already using.
In some cases, this will come from central government, in others from an exam board, and in others it will have been decided internally – by a department or year group team – usually in partial conjunction with aims or guidelines provided by the government or the school’s leadership team.
Familiarising yourself with the curriculum you will be expected to teach – or curricula depending on your areas of expertise – is essential.
While some trainee teachers opt for the wait and see approach, this is a difficult path from which to maximise your success.
A better option is to find out which curriculum is being used and to get hold of a copy.
You can then spend time looking through this, so you can build up a picture of what it contains, understand the rationale behind its construction and assess what existing knowledge you have and what additional information you might need to seek out.
Curricula provided by the government are available online.
These vary in the extent of their prescription.
Some schools also carry printed copies, although this is increasingly rare.
Exam board curricula are also available via the internet.
These are usually referred to as specifications, meaning the specification of what an examined course of study ought to cover.
If you are training to teach secondary age children, you should find out which exam boards your department uses to ensure you research the correct specifications.
I have seen trainees fall foul of this on more than one occasion, inadvertently familiarising themselves with a specification that isn’t actually taught in their school.
Beyond this, most schools will have administrative documents mapping the programmes of study learners are expected follow at different ages and/or in different subjects.
You should ask your mentor where these are kept and read through them to get a sense of what teaching and learning in your subject or year group is based upon.
If you have multiple school placements during your training period, be sure to repeat the process – there will always be differences between what one school does and what another opts for.
Being alive to this and researching it in advance will smooth your transition between placements.
The final place in which you can look to find information about the curriculum is the existing lessons teachers in your department or year group have planned.
With any luck, these will be available through a shared folder on the school’s computer network.
If they are, great! You can browse through them at leisure.
This will help you to get a sense of what the curriculum is, as well as what the content looks like when translated into lesson form.
If lessons are not freely available, you will need to ask colleagues if they are happy to give you access.
Explain why you want to look at them and this is unlikely to be a problem.
When seeking to be a successful trainee teacher, familiarity with the curriculum is an important point to address.
The better you understand what you are being asked to teach, the better placed you are to create lessons that fly.
In addition, if you have a good understanding of what the curriculum as a whole looks like, and the reasons behind its design, you will be better placed to plan learning for learners and to talk to them about where you and they are going, as well as why you are going there.
As a final note, you might find it instructive to research the wider history of the curriculum.
This can be done quickly and easily on the internet.
While this research will not have a direct bearing on what you do in the classroom, it will help to contextualise the present situation for you, giving you a better understanding of the political and pedagogical drivers underpinning the current way of doing things.
Roles
A multitude of roles exist within any school.
Some of these are common across many institutions, some are unique to a single school.
To get a sense of how names for standard roles (teacher, head of department, assistant head teacher) can proliferate into a wide range of nomenclature, look through the jobs being advertised on the TES website.
You will see lots of different names used to refer to roles that are essentially the same.
It will serve your cause well to become familiar with the different roles in your school.
This will help you to work out how accountability is distributed, who is responsible for what, and who to call on should you need support with a particular matter.
Here I will give a brief overview of the key roles you are likely to come across.
The headteacher or principal leads the school.
Generally, they will have been a practising teacher themselves and will have worked their way up the management structure.
Some schools have an executive headteacher or executive principal.
Such a person looks after multiple schools, offering leadership to each while seconds-in-command deal with the day-to-day running of the schools in question.
The senior leadership team (commonly referred to as the SLT) are a group of teachers, all of whom have senior managerial responsibilities and who work with the headteacher to run the school.
Deputy headteachers or vice principals are second in charge.
There are usually between 1 and 3 of these roles in a school.
Assistant headteachers or assistant principals are found on the next rung of the management ladder.
These roles tend to come with specific areas of whole-school responsibility.
Numbers can vary from 2 – 10 depending on the size and budget of the school.
Following this we have middle management.
These are teachers who have been given managerial responsibility below that of the senior leadership team.
In a secondary school this includes heads of departments and pastoral leaders such as heads of house or heads of year.
In primary schools, responsibilities are often conferred to cover subject specialisms and year groups.
Outside these roles you will usually find administrative staff, a bursar or director of finance, receptionists, caretakers and reprographics staff, as well as teaching assistants (also know as learning support assistants).
Everyone in school has an important role to play.
If you want to do well, be pleasant, friendly and positive.
An obvious point, sure.
But never underestimate the power of reputation.
Even if you have a short placement, people will quickly make up their minds about you – whether their opinions are accurate or not.
And this information is likely to be brought up in the kind of run-of-the-mill conversations people have on a daily basis.
Now, while it is unlikely that anything here could work against you, consider how a glowing recommendation, or even a kind word, can work in your favour if heard by your mentor or a member of SLT (who might be looking to recruit trainee teachers into full-time posts).
From my own experience, I would strongly recommend developing a good relationship with whoever oversees the photocopier – if they like you, it will almost always be to your advantage.
Two final points regarding roles before we move on.
Understanding who is responsible for what means you can ask the right person for the right help as and when required.
It also makes it easier for you to use the school’s systems effectively.
As a trainee teacher, you will encounter several roles that are relevant only to you and your fellow trainees.
Your mentor, of course.
But also, quite likely, a coordinator of the professional studies programme, called a PCM in some schools.
Developing a positive relationship with the holders of these roles is helpful for your success.
They are the key people responsible for monitoring your progress and for observing you teach.
The best advice when it comes to working with your mentor and PCM (or equivalent) is that almost everyone values and respects punctuality, good organisation, hard work, a positive attitude and the ability to learn from constructive criticism.
The Training Process
Next, we turn to the training process, about which I will say only a few things, though each one is important.
First is timing.
A good understanding of the timing of those events that form part of your training is necessary if you want to maximise your success.
You should identify what is expected of you when and, in the process, pick out any potential pinch points.
For example, do you have to hand in an assignment in the same week that your teaching load increases? Or is an important assessment point scheduled for the same week as a friend’s wedding?
Knowing how your course pans out means you can deal with potential trouble spots in advance.
It will help you to understand where you are going, giving you a precise roadmap to which you can return when things get busy during the year.
And it will allow you to see the course from the viewpoint of others.
This can provide perspective.
It can also help you to work in such a way that you make life easy for your tutor and mentor – something that will not go unnoticed.
Armed with an understanding of timing, you will be able to plan ahead.
Doing so will give you a chance to stagger your workload.
This will not make training a breeze. Inevitably there will be periods when you have a lot of work on.
But it will allow you to think about how to prevent an excessive workload developing.
For example, you might note that there is a quiet period before the Christmas holidays and decide to use this as an opportunity to get an assignment ticked off or to work on your portfolio.
Whatever decisions you take, they will be better for having been made in advance, with a clear understanding of what is likely to be expected and on what deadline.
Finally, we come to the requirements your course makes for a trainee to be deemed highly successful.
In the blogs looking at the nature of learning, one of the answers I suggested was that learning is essentially a matter of success and failure.
On unpacking this, we saw how success is easier to achieve if the criteria by which that success is judged are made accessible to learners.
In the classroom, that is part of the teacher’s job.
Outside the classroom, we need to be independent and take this job on for ourselves.
If you want to be an outstanding trainee teacher – and I am sure that you do – then your mission will be made a lot simpler if you know what you need to do to achieve this.
The convenor of your course will likely have provided you with documents indicating what is necessary for the highest grading.
Read through these.
Think about what they mean.
Talk to your mentor about them. Take advantage of their experience.
Ask them to contextualise the criteria by giving you concrete examples.
If anything feels vague or ambiguous, ask for clarification.
Collect any queries you have and share them with the person running your course (this is a better approach than firing off emails as and when you think of something, which can be annoying for the person on the other end).
And why not ask for examples of previous assignments that scored highly?
Or to look at previous portfolios of trainee teachers who were given the highest grades?
Or find a member of staff in your school who can show you what an outstanding lesson looks like.
You could even take your observation matrix into the lesson with you and tick off what they do as and when they do it.
The aim here is to give yourself the best chance of being successful – to set yourself up for success.
Following the steps above will give you a precise idea of what is needed to achieve the highest grades, making it much easier to achieve what you desire.
