How to be a Brilliant Trainee Teacher

Trevor Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317478751
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

How to be a Brilliant Trainee Teacher sets out clear and practical guidelines to support your training and enhance your teaching, moving you directly towards a real understanding of how and why pupils learn and how you can enhance your own progress. This second edition has been updated to offer you timely advice that has been drawn from the author's extensive and successful personal experience as a teacher-trainer, teacher and examiner.

The book offers reassurance and support with the difficulties you might encounter through your training as a teacher. Why won't Year 8 actually do anything? Why do we have to read all this theory? I know my pace and timing need improvement, but what do I actually do about it? Why haven't I moved forward at all in the last four weeks?

It does this by:

· outlining strategies for organisation;

· exploring issues of personal development;

· demystifying areas often seen as difficult or complex;

· providing achievable and practical solutions;

· directly addressing anxieties.

Although a practical book, at its heart lie essential principles about good teaching and learning. It is anecdotal and readable, and may be dipped into for innovative lesson ideas or read from cover to cover as a short, enjoyable course that discovers exciting teaching principles in successful, practical experience.

How to be a Brilliant Trainee Teacher is ideal for secondary trainee teachers, but the underlying principles about what makes a brilliant trainee teacher are applicable to primary trainees too.

Chapter 1
Questions at an interview

We all know about teaching. Individually, we are subjected to it compulsorily for at least eleven years, experiencing it and evaluating it day after day. We sit in classrooms thinking, ‘This is good’, or ‘Blimey, I could do better than this myself’. Collectively, we are used to turning to schools to solve society’s problems and sometimes blaming them for its ills. We have opinions and information about teaching that far exceed our relationship with any other profession. Teaching is the most visible of all occupations. It is also the most misunderstood.

Of course, teaching is an exciting profession. It is rewarding, varied, creative and challenging. It is unpredictable, funny and intellectually stimulating. It’s not a fantasy job (rock star, astronaut) but it’s the best real-world job available, if you can do it. Nevertheless, our perception of it is blighted by the illusion that we already understand it.

If you are to train as a teacher, you have to answer the fundamental question ‘Why do you want to teach?’ You will be asked this at interview; but, more significantly, you should be asking yourself anyway. A common answer, and probably the worst possible, is ‘Because I’ve always wanted to’. This is alarming, because it implies that your perception of teaching originated when you were at school and may not have been revisited, questioned or re-evaluated since then. It may therefore be based on a fallacious understanding of what teachers actually do.

Before you even apply for teacher training you must inform yourself about a teacher’s job. It consists of much more than standing in front of groups of children, passing on knowledge. Brilliant teachers aren’t just knowledgeable; they aren’t just charismatic, or presentationally gifted, or good at keeping order. Hollywood versions of teaching (Jack Black, Robin Williams) are not to be relied on. The classroom achievements of real teachers are the tip of a range of crucial and exhausting activities, and you need to know something about those activities and how they fit together.

Of course, you should begin by examining your initial motives. There are many positive and convincing reasons for wanting to be a teacher and it will help if you prioritise these at an early stage. Here are some of the answers given typically by interview candidates at the start of their training. Each is a legitimate motivation but each needs to be considered for its strengths and limitations.

Because I love my subject

This is a strong and valuable motivation, especially for secondary teachers. Of course you need to know a lot about your subject, and you need to be enthusiastic about it. Indeed, children value enthusiasm in teachers very highly – more highly, in fact, than subject knowledge. The desire to kindle enthusiasm, as it was kindled in you, is a powerful and idealistic one.

On its own, however, this is not sufficient. If your prime motivation is the continued pursuit of your subject – if, for example, you see postgraduate teacher training as an alternative to master’s-level subject study – you are in for shocks and disappointments. For one thing, the subject of most training programmes is not maths or history, but education. Subject knowledge may well need extensive expansion, but this will often depend on self-study, while you will be formally occupied by reading, researching and understanding about children, adolescents and how they think and learn. This should include the study of professional issues and of various models of educational theory and practice. If you don’t see potential fascination in this – and it is potentially fascinating, by the way, as well as creative and rewarding – then you should think again.

It’s not uncommon for interview candidates to believe that teacher training is the brushing-up of presentational skills. They say, ‘I know the subject, but I need to know how to get it across.’ This isn’t a promising starting point. Teaching is much more than ‘getting it across’, as we will see in later chapters. This is what makes it challenging, but it’s also what makes it exciting.

In any case, your subject knowledge itself may well need considerable readjustment. Secondary English or music or maths may seem at first sight to have little to do with what you did for your degree.

And of course you were very good at it at school. This is one of the dilemmas of teaching a subject. You are (and have to be) an expert on it; but you are teaching it to people who aren’t experts and who, for the most part, never will be. Many of them have little intrinsic interest in what you have to say to them. You have to think about these people. If you want to be (say) an English teacher, one of the best things to think about is the lessons you were worst at at school – not, in this example, your English lessons. In my case it was chemistry. I couldn’t accept (and still don’t really believe) that the world and the solid objects within it are made up of tiny revolving particles. I wasn’t stupid; but I couldn’t understand this, however hard I tried. I couldn’t get football, either, and my team-mates used to put me in goal in the mistaken belief that there I would do least harm. I was quite large, and they told me to stand still in the hope that the ball would bounce off me. These memories are my chief allies now when I’m planning lessons – not the memories of the subjects I was good at. I think hard about what my pupils will find difficult or irrelevant. I imagine the barriers. You have to accept that you will be teaching your subject to pupils most of whom (statistically) don’t like it. I love this; I love changing their minds; it beats preaching to the converted any day; but it’s a complex business, and you must be aware that it’s the business of every teacher, not just the unlucky ones.

Because I want to do something socially valuable

Teaching is, as we will repeatedly see, extremely hard work. Not all good teachers are idealistic, but there’s no doubt that having an idealistic basis is very sustaining in offsetting the efforts and the challenges. When children misbehave, for example, it’s reassuring to remind yourself that what you’re doing is important for them, of value to them rather than to you, even though they don’t see that at the time. They are benefiting, even though they don’t know it.

Moreover, all teaching should promote understanding, harmony and humanity. If you genuinely feel this, it’s a good place to start. If you don’t, then you should be honest with yourself and consider other aspects of the job that might appeal to you instead.

This powerful and altruistic motivation, like all altruism, demands some sacrifice. Your salary as a teacher won’t keep you in luxury. The workload is infinite and particularly challenging during the training period. The demands of the job are varied and unpredictable. Accountability is enormous and seems to be ever growing. Social life for a trainee is extremely limited. Teachers don’t finish at 3.30pm. They work in the evening and for a good part of the weekend, marking, planning and chasing data on the progress of their pupils. They do extensive preparation during the famously long holidays. These are some of the costs of your altruism.

Because I like children

Of course it’s helpful if you enjoy the company of young people; children are entertaining and often hilarious. They are as varied, however, as any other group of people and you need to look straight at them rather than idealising or generalising. If you already know adolescents, you should think about how differently you might relate to them as a teacher. You may have children of your own, you may work as a teaching assistant, or in the youth service. These are valuable experiences but these relationships are not the same as those between pupils and teachers.

You are not going to be the pupils’ friend in most definitions of that word. You may be closer to some of them in age than you are to your colleagues, but trading on this is at best short-lived and at worst dangerous. You will get older, but your pupils won’t. And many pupils like a distance between themselves and their teachers; they have friends of their own. I remember having to call my drama teacher ‘Bob’. I liked drama, I liked the teacher, but I didn’t want to call him ‘Bob’. I liked us to know where we were. As a trainee teacher, popularity will come easily to you. Pupils like a change and, if you’re young, they will respond to that as well, for a time. You might just be able to name pop bands without looking stupid. But don’t be seduced by this; it won’t last. Do you really want to end up as that RE teacher who played old Beatles’ songs on the guitar during those long, embarrassed assemblies? Teaching isn’t a popularity contest. Doing a good job will make pupils enjoy your company and your lessons. As in other parts of life, popularity comes to those who don’t go out looking for it.

Because it’s creative

The process of taking what you know and helping pupils to understand its concepts and its value is certainly a creative one. Often the difference between a brilliant lesson and a mediocre one lies in small, creative adjustments, usually made at the planning stage. At the heart of this is the constant need to imagine the pupils’ responses to what you’re planning.

It’s in the planning of learning that success is ensured – not, for example, in charismatic delivery. Lessons involve three elements: the teacher; the material to be taught; and the pupils. At the planning stage, only two of these will be physically present; the third – the pupils – has to be imagined and their predicted reactions, understanding, difficulties and enthusiasms have to inform all the planning decisions that you make. Once you master this creative knack, planning starts to become easy and productive; but some teachers find this easier than others.

Furthermore, there are various statutory policies which make detailed and compulsory statements about what we teach and how we teach it. In particular, the National Curriculum and the GCSE criteria for older children provide strong direction. Ofsted (the Office for Standards in Education) appears to have clear opinions about how lessons should be, and schools are not inclined to ignore them. You might at first be surprised to find that there is so much regulation of teaching at a national level; you can look at examples of it by consulting the websites listed in the next section. Such regulation must in some ways inhibit the personal creativity of teachers.

Gathering information

Having considered such motivations, and prioritised them for yourself, you are a step closer to answering the big question. However, as well as clarifying your own views, you need to properly inform yourself (as far as you can at this stage) about what a teacher does. You should do as much of this as you can before applying and certainly before attending an interview on a training programme.

There are two main fields for this. You should read as much as you can and you should do some practical research. This research should include a formally structured school visit.

Be realistic: the personal view

In all this activity, however, you should be kind to yourself. You must always remember that you’ve done no training at all and are very likely to some extent to be bewildered and intimidated by what you read and see. In this and in many aspects of training you may be helped by the mostly useful ‘learning-to-drive’ analogy.

You may remember learning to drive. You may remember watching people using both hands and both feet at the same time while making constant and impossible decisions about steering, accelerating, not killing people, and so on. I remember thinking, ‘I’ll never be able to do all this.’ In fact I remember my father saying (this being a long time ago, when driving instructors were considered the reckless indulgence of the very rich): ‘Look at all the idiots who can drive. They all passed their test. So will you.’

The analogy works only partially. Teachers aren’t idiots (I’ve been one for thirty years) but, nevertheless, it’s encouraging to look around staffrooms and to think ‘If they all got through this, so can I.’ All sorts of people survive training programmes and move on to do the job. But when you first begin to look at what teachers do – for example, when you first look at teachers working, or at the National Curriculum or the Teachers’ Standards – you should expect to feel either ‘I don’t understand a word of this’ or ‘I understand it but I have no idea how to do it’ or, most likely, a mixture of both. You have had no training yet. Do not be intimidated. You learned to drive; or, if you didn’t, you will.

Reading and researching: a personal approach

This section suggests information sources which you should dip into at an early stage, while still deciding whether you want to teach, and then again early in the application process. These are materials that you will refer back to as a trainee and as a teacher, and some of them aren’t written directly for people in these very early stages. You cannot hope therefore to make full sense of all of them or to take an informed overview of them. It doesn’t help that many formal statements about education are general and abstract. This means that quite often you won’t object to them – you would expect an English programme to require pupils ‘to speak fluently and appro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Questions at an interview
• 2 Key journeys
• 3 Being a teacher
• 4 Being a trainee
• 5 Planning
• 6 Managing learning, managing classrooms
• 7 Reflection and evaluation
• 8 Being brilliant
• 9 Finishing and starting
• Suggested reading
• Index