A mere five weeks ago I embarked on my Teach First Summer Institute journey. I was plunged into a whirlwind of information, pedagogy and teaching techniques.Now, I emerge out the other side feeling slightly more prepared, a little more confident and wholly excited for September.

If you haven’t been following along you can join me right at the start on Day 1 of Summer Institute. I’ve been writing this blog to give you guys an idea of what to expect during Summer Institute. However, this has also been an incredible tool to reflect on what I’ve done each week, revisit and revise content and to display just how thorough the training is.

Without further ado let’s get into it. Week 5 consisted of two Teach First seminars, a Development Lead meeting and the Closing Ceremony. I’m going to run you through some of the content, my thoughts and any other rambling that may occur.

Let’s jump in!

Week 4 Seminar – Wellbeing

Teach First have been really good at focussing on you and your wellbeing as a teacher. They provide space and time for you to reflect on your wellbeing and offer supportive strategies to enable you to manage.

Did you know that:
– Teachers work on average 54.4 hours a week. Going up to 55.5 hours in Primary education. Senior Leaders in education work 60 hours a week.
– On average you’re actually only teaching 21.6 hours. The other 33 hours are spent on tasks such as planning, marking and admin.
– 93% of teachers said workload is at least a “fairly serious problem”.

I really value the fact that we aren’t being sold false information, rather we’re being prepared for the realities of the job we’re about to enter. We covered topics such as time management and how to prioritise; focussing specifically on the Eisenhower Matrix.

Stress

I bet if I asked, you could take a good guess at the common stressors for teachers. That’s right, you guessed it… workload and student misbehaviour accounted for most of the variance in predicting teaching stress (Boyle et al 1995). Looking further into the research this was brought up quite frequently.

A lot of people don’t realise how bad stress is for you. In society today, we have bombarded ourselves with stressors. We have financial stress, relational stress, career stress, family stress. We have phones pinging off every 5 seconds, and debt is a serious issue. I’m an advocate for a less stressful life – and I work quite hard at and have become quite adept at not stressing.

I say this because, stress can have really negative impacts on your quality of life. It can make you unwell, can damage relationships and can lower your life expectancy. There’s so much I could say here… and I actually might write a post on stress after this. Because I think stress is becoming a disease brought about by modern society, and I don’t think we’re prepared to cope with it on the whole.

I also think it’s great that Teach First are breaking down barriers surrounding mental health and providing training, support and strategies. We need more of this.

Some of the strategies we looked at were sleeping patterns and routines. I will admit I’m not the best at sleeping… I sleep lightly, dream often and take forever to get my mind to go to sleep. However, I haven’t built up good sleeping habits or routines. Like everything I’ve learnt in this training; the more intentional you are the better your results.

We also looked at mindfulness and breathing. These are two fantastic ways to destress and allow your mind to take a breather and your body to negate any negativity or stressors.

Adaptive Teaching – Scaffolding

On to the more pedagogy related content. We spent some time covering scaffolding and flexible groupings. I’ll start with scaffolding as I think this is more commonly used in day to day lessons.

Scaffolding is identified as an effective strategy that can be used to adapt your teaching and lessons in order to respond to the needs of your pupils, including this with SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disability). I basically learnt this as, steps or tools that enable your students to build their way up to understanding a topic. It’s maybe like a hint/prompt in a quiz.

When planning my lessons, I think it’s good practice to plan in scaffolding for each section. You may not have to use it, but it is a really useful tool to have planned and at your disposal should you need to bridge or scaffold the learning experience.

Flexible Groupings

I don’t know if you had this experience of ‘sets’ in your school education. Where people were set with people of similar ability to themselves. This often meant that students with SEND or lower attaining students were grouped together at the bottom. However, research has found that this can have a negative impact of pupil’s learning, attitude and engagement.

I found this really eye opening. At the school I TA’d at, we had a SEND transition group. It was interesting to note the behaviour of students who just absolutely abhorred being in the class. But, when you transferred them to a main stream group they were as quiet as a lamb and all the behavioural issues seemed to disappear until they came back to the SEND class.

For flexible groupings to work well, we were advised that we know our objectives. Teaching often seems to come back to ‘knowing what you want students to know or do’ before you plan anything. By creating an even balance, knowing where students are at (via assessment) and of how they are in class should provide a good picture to base your groupings off.

Week 5 – Building Successful Relationships & Working with your TA!

I absolutely love that this content was covered!! Coming from a TA background, I’ve walked into so many classes and just stood there, relatively useless, wondering what in the world is going on. It’s also a really good basis; especially if you find meeting new people and quickly forming friendships hard. It’s interesting, directing something like forming relationships (something most of us do without thinking) and looking at how you can be strategic in that element too.

There’s so much I can say here, and it’s interesting to gather all the different opinions. But, what do you think makes an effective relationship?

David Clutterbuck defined a successful relationship using this criteria.

• Clear sense of purpose: There is a direct correlation between how purposeful a relationship is and how effective it is.
• Developing rapport and trust: This is vital in building a positive working relationship.
• Willingness to experiment and explore: Relationships are successful where colleagues take risks, challenge each other and explore what they need.

I want to add my own one in. If you’ve ever looked into the work of Brené Brown. She often talks about vulnerability being the key to successful relationships. She say’s that when you are bold enough to be open and vulnerable with someone else, this is how you can build lasting, strong relationships. You can have a look here: she says it a lot better than me!

There’s a lot more I could say… but I’ll leave you with those thoughts for now…

Working with your TA.

TAs are one of the BEST resources you have in your classroom. If you aren’t using your TA’s effectively you’re missing a trick. They have a wealth of knowledge on your students. They can mitigate and help with behaviour management or micro teach a selection of students who need additional support. TA’s are NOT there for your photocopying needs – even if out of the goodness of their heart they’ll do it.

The thing I most took away from this is to have a plan for your TA. Find out if you’re having a TA in your class, and then plan to use them. There’s nothing more annoying for the TA than to have to stand there and watch. All it takes is a small conversation and a bit of forethought and you can utilise a wonderful asset.

Furthermore, I often found there was a TA – Teacher divide. I don’t think there needs to be a divide. I’m going to talk to my TA’s and find out everything they know to help me plan and adapt my practice to best meet the needs of the students.

Planning – One last lesson.

Our seminars always included a planning session. It was really useful to have peer to peer feedback, to present your plan and to gather techniques from all the other trainees. This planning session called for us to create a full lesson plan based on one of the topics we will be teaching in the first week of school. Alas – because of COVID, our school is restructuring what they’re teaching and so this was a little hard to figure.

Therefore I chose a random English topic and began. We started with the Begin with the End strategy and I’ll run you through the steps in which I approached planning this lesson.

First, I decided what I wanted the students know, or be able to do by the end of the lesson that they couldn’t do before. I linked all of this back to an example long term plan and then the medium term plan.

Then, I decided on assessment. This allowed me to check pupil progress and what they have achieved. It’s great for informing you on what needs to be taught. I included 4 steps.

1. What – What is the pupils prior knowledge? Do I need to recap/ check for understanding or identify misconceptions?
2. When – What stage of the lesson am I planning to assess?
3. How – What strategies will I use to allow pupils to demonstrate their progress?
4. Plan – Consider a specific question that will allow me to work out what my pupil does or does not know.

Finally, I planned the activities using various effective learning strategies, modelling, Rosenshine’s principles and other specific English related pedagogical techniques such as SRE, Darts and Gene Theory.

This was a great opportunity to tie all the work I’ve done on planning together. It is also great to have a fully functioning plan, that flows nicely. It makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something.

Practice – Least Invasive Consequences

The final section of the seminar allowed us to practice a few TLAC (Teach Like a Champion) techniques. I won’t take too long on this segment. I will just talk briefly about a good tip of Least Invasive Consequence.

Watching different teachers deal with difficult behaviour was interesting to observe as a TA. I often noticed that teachers who went 0-100 real quick often lost the respect of the class. Teachers who didn’t challenge behaviour also struggled with behaviour management.

The teachers that succeeded, didn’t create tension but controlled the behaviour through being consistent with their expectations and allowing students to correct their behaviour without it becoming a power struggle.

Now, what I meant by power struggle is a challenge. You tell a student to stop talking, “Johnny, stop talking and get on with your work”. Johnny then feels you’ve unfairly picked on him and embarrassed him in front of the class. So lil Johnny decides to talk back and so a power struggle emerges of who’s more dominant. This can be really stressful and unproductive situation.

So, least invasive techniques shows you how to use body language or plural pronouns to correct behaviour without calling a student out. So for example, you could be walking around the class and see someone isn’t concentrating and just tap your finger on their book. Or, when waiting for compliance and two students are still talking, you could say, “I have 90% of the class ready to listen I’m just waiting for two more”. This enables students to correct their behaviour without feeling attacked or embarrassed.

Summary

And so we come to the end of Summer Institute. The week ended with a closing ceremony to congratulate us all on the hard work and commitment we’ve shown to the program thus far.

I’ve honestly learnt so much, I’ve gained valuable skills, practiced them, learnt how to plan and assess and prepared myself for September by visiting my school. It’s been an intensive five weeks. But, it’s been vital.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my weekly update and if you’re nervous about what to expect, I hope this has been a good resource for you.

If you have any comments or any topics you would like me to cover please leave them in the comment section. I’m looking forward to have a little rest over August and getting myself ready for my school induction in September.

Finally, if you’re interested in teaching and Teach First has inspired you a little – why not check them out here – Teach First

I hope you have a great summer and I’ll be back with my weekly updates in September.