Teach Like You Imagined It

Finding the right balance

Kevin Lister

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781785834240
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Kevin Lister's Teach Like You Imagined It: Finding the right balance shares a wealth of tools, ideas and encouragement to help teachers manage the conflicting pressures of teaching and become the educators they imagined.

Teaching is an incredible profession, but it also comes with a potentially toxic workload. You do not have to put up with burn-out, however and one way to avoid it is to return to how you imagined teaching to be in the first place.

Before you became a teacher, you pictured yourself as a teacher; in your imagination you almost certainly saw yourself as happy, efficient and able to manage your worklife balance effectively. Yet chances are that the reality of teaching is a little different, and it is this disconnect that can give rise to stress, anxiety and frustration.

But what if you could use simple strategies to get a handle on your schedule and take control of your workload?

Covering lesson planning, behaviour management, the streamlining of marking and getting the best out of CPD, Kevin Lister has drawn on his background in engineering to fill this book with trusted techniques and savvy suggestions to help you maximise your productivity and teach like you imagined it.

Each chapter examines a different aspect of the day-to-day reality of teaching and suggests alternative, practical ways to look at or approach common tasks. Throughout the book Kevin touches on topics such as time management, prioritisation, educational research, leadership, psychology and other diverse concepts that his personal experiences and education have led him to explore. After each area of discussion there are prompts for action, where Kevin asks you to reflect on your working habits, question your practices and decide what you will do in response.

Suitable for both new and experienced teachers looking to boost their day-to-day efficiency and find the right balance.

Chapter 1

UNDERSTAND YOUR SUBJECT AND HOW TO FUNCTION IN SCHOOL

Subject knowledge

Depending on your school and role, knowing the subject – or subjects – that you need to teach can prove difficult, particularly if you are required to teach outside of your specialism. Due to staffing constraints, some schools require teachers to deliver lessons outside of their comfort zone. If this is the case, then there is often no single easy solution, and it can certainly be a source of added workload and stress. It is safe to say that the better you know the subject, the more confident you are likely to be when teaching it. This confidence extends to lesson planning, lesson delivery and assessment.

My main advice here is that if you are required to teach topics or subjects that are beyond your comfort zone, then try to access as much support as you possibly can. Wherever possible, seek out experts within your school for advice. Talk to your line manager and investigate whether there are any training courses that you could go on to improve in this area. For secondary schools and sixth forms, exam boards will often offer training or other forms of professional development.

I also recommend that you make the most of any free support available on social media platforms such as Twitter. You could investigate the possibility of sharing ideas with local schools, who may have teachers in a similar situation – you could make use of the same resources and support each other. See if there are any SLEs within your own school or the local network. These are teachers who are recognised as having good knowledge in specific areas and who often support others in developing their practice, though their time may be chargeable to your school. It may even be possible to reach out to local universities, particularly if they offer teacher training, as they may be able to offer subject- or phase-specific input.

In any school there should be a backbone scheme of work that inexperienced teachers can pick up and deliver. More experienced teachers may well use this only as a guideline and create their own spin on it; however, that does not remove the need for a core scheme that anyone can run with if needed. If this is not in place it needs to be highlighted to the SLT.

Functioning effectively in the school environment

Across the teaching profession, as in other professional occupations, there is an expectation that individuals will be involved in CPD. In England the Teachers’ Standards definition includes the statement that all teachers must “take responsibility for improving teaching through appropriate professional development, responding to advice and feedback from colleagues”.1

In my experience, however, there is a conflict between the intent and the reality of CPD. The intent is the ongoing, continuous development of professional practice to improve teaching. This should help to combat the plateau, which I mentioned in the introduction, that research suggests occurs after around three to five years in the profession. If CPD and training continues to be provided throughout a teacher’s career, but effectivity tends to reach a plateau, why should this be?

Since 1988, state schools in England have had five In Service Education and Training (INSET) days allocated across the school year to ensure that time is allocated to training and CPD. Schools use these for various purposes, but together they represent just 2.6% of the directed time in the school year, which is a really tiny proportion. As such, these INSET days – and any other time available for CPD – are too precious to waste. As the Teachers’ Standards states: “Appropriate self-evaluation, reflection and professional development activity is critical to improving teachers’ practice at all career stages.”2 CPD is important, but we all too often think of it as an add-on or something that only happens five days a year.

Owning your own CPD

The Teachers’ Standards is clear that CPD is the responsibility of every teacher. So when was the last time you sat down and honestly self-assessed your skills? It is very hard to be completely honest, but it is important to do this from time to time. Specifically, you should be acknowledging your strengths and, most importantly, looking for weaknesses and how to make improvements. Are your lessons always planned well enough? Which bits of your lessons are the weakest? Are you always effective at managing behaviour? Are you comfortable delivering information in assemblies or to large groups of staff? Do you know how to use all aspects of Microsoft Office? Do you fully understand the behaviour management system in your school? Is there a particular class that you struggle with?

I am sure that you can come up with many more searching questions to expose your weaker aspects. I do not mean this as a critique or attack: we all have them, and it is only by being aware of them that we can develop and improve. I am not asking you to bare your soul here; this is simply about acknowledging the areas in which we know we are weaker and then seeking to address them. However, this might require us to adopt a different perspective on CPD.

In my view, effective CPD should achieve one of three things for the individual:

1. It should allow you to understand a system or process that you previously did not.
2. It should improve the general quality of your teaching.
3. It should improve the efficiency of your work so that you can achieve the same outcomes with less effort.

Time spent on CPD should result in lasting improvements in your day-to-day practice. I suggest that most CPD is often only focused upon the first two outcomes, and the second is often too vaguely defined and easily ignored through reversion to old habits. The third aspect of CPD is not explored anywhere near enough. Just as any effective revision session should conclude with the students knowing more than at the start, effective CPD should result in the teacher knowing something new, being able to do something new or being able to do something better. As professionals it is our responsibility to own our own CPD, just as much as it is the responsibility of the SLT to facilitate this. If the provision for CPD in your school does not clearly achieve one or more of these three outcomes, then it is wasting your time and you should question it.

Of course, I appreciate that some may find the prospect of questioning CPD daunting. In many schools, individual teachers may not be able to shape the whole-school CPD agenda; however, you can shape how you interact with it and how you manage your personal development around the whole-school programme. If something is offered whole-school, you can seek to find the most useful aspects of it for you. If you decide you need something that is not covered by the whole-school programme, then you can seek to find time to manage this for yourself. It is your professional development, not anyone else’s, so you are entitled to have an input and to shape it to fit your needs.

Types of CPD

There are a wide range of activities that could be counted as CPD. This may include technical training on specific types of software, training on school-specific processes, training on aspects of curricular or subject knowledge, development of behaviour management strategies and guidance on approaches to the practical aspects of teaching – such as lesson planning or delivery. Some may be more immediately practical in application, such as first aid courses. In England, there is also a requirement for regular training on child protection and safeguarding. Each of these types of training certainly has merit; however, individuals will value each one differently depending on their personal perspective and needs.

I recall sitting in a leadership meeting in which another member of staff was complaining that an INSET day was being wasted because we were just doing technical systems training and nothing that would change the delivery of lessons. This person failed to see that CPD involves all aspects of professional practice; in their view the only activities that counted were classroom-based. Both aspects are important, they are just rated differently in terms of personal priorities.

I would argue that the most effective training is often technical or systems-based, such as refining the use of the computer system to take a register or record behaviour incidents. There are reasons why this type of training can be more effective. Firstly, if you use the system regularly after the training you will get the chance to reinforce what you have learnt. Secondly, it is effective because usually there is no other option than for you to use that system; you cannot revert to another process, so the more efficiently you can use this one, the better.

In my experience, the least effective training is often a general mass-delivered session about the specifics of teaching. In these sessions it is easy to dismiss the suggested approaches as not applicable to you, your subject or your class because the examples used do not fit your situation. While it can be true that techniques do not necessarily translate to every teacher, discipline and classroom, it is also far easier for us to raise a barrier and conclude that the idea will not work than it is to find our own way of achieving the same ends. Even if you do manage to make links to your own practice and get inspired by the training, it usually requires you to do something different in the aftermath.

Unfortunately, we are creatures of habit, so doing something different takes lots of motivation and real persistence to make it stick. In terms of day-to-day practice following this type of training, there is usually the option to continue as you were. The “carry on regardless” approach is usually the one that appears the easiest at the time and is certainly the route we will revert to if any difficulties crop up in the new way of doing things. The result is often that these sessions are tolerated, and may even produce a small short-term change, but are then ultimately ignored in the long term.

How often have you heard someone round up a training session by asking something like, “What are you going to do differently tomorrow as a result of the training?” How often have you done anything truly different that has lasted in the long term? My guess, and my personal experience, is not often, because real life takes over and we revert to our normal habits. So, when it is planned at a whole-school level, CPD can be hit-and-miss at best, which is a tragic position given the scarcity of the time we have available for it.

Every time that a day, or even an hour, devoted to CPD results in no meaningful impact on the working lives of those involved we are doing ourselves a disservice. Yet I know from experience and discussions with peers that this happens on a massive scale across schools. In this way, I think CPD is broken, and I believe it is the responsibility of school leaders to set about fixing it, in collaboration with the whole staff. However, as I have said, I do not like to wait for others to fix things and think each individual teacher can play a part in improving the impact of the CPD they receive. We will now look at each of the three types in turn, with a view to how individuals can seek to get the best out of them.

CPD for systems and processes

The first outcome of successful CPD is that it should allow you to understand a system or process that you previously did not. Ensuring that all staff can access the necessary IT systems is a fundamental requirement in terms of training provision, as it allows them to function in their roles on a day-to-day basis. However, while you may be able to get by with a basic operational understanding, there is often a much greater functionality available within these systems that can be left untapped if you do not know how to access it. I would encourage you to consider whether a deeper knowledge of the systems your school uses could improve your effectiveness in your role. For example, you might want to access class data that is not readily available in other formats or that you have not been trained to access. At a departmental or school leadership level, do you need to be able to access and summarise data for your area of responsibility, and are you often dependent on someone else generating this report for you?

Most systems have a way to create reports or different routes to export data that allow you to get exactly what you want, when you want it, but often very few people know how to use these. If you think this type of knowledge would help in your role then seek out extra training to help fill in the gaps. Often within a school there is a local expert who has a deeper understanding of key systems, so spend time with them and ask how to generate the information you need for your role. If your school does not have a resident expert, try to become that person. Most systems have user forums on their websites or on social media, where users share tips and ideas. Make use of online help, helpdesk phone numbers or online chats.

Sometimes the use of IT systems is viewed as a necessary evil that must be tolerated and interacted with as little as possible – sometimes this is seen as a distraction from “proper” teaching. The way to stop this is to learn how to use the systems well and in ways that will proactively enhance your teaching. Learning to work with the systems effectively is a valuable outcome of CPD, and if there is something that frustrates you – or you think that understanding it might make your role easier – it is well worth investing some time in getting to know the system better. Time spent ensuring that you really understand the systems is not a distraction from teaching, but an essential part of it.

School-wide processes and procedures are the other functional aspect of CPD that can be viewed simply as something to be tolerated. In many ways, as long as a classroom teacher knows the process for responding to a behavioural issue and giving an appropriate sanction, they have enough information to complete their day-to-day work. However, if they do not know how their part fits with the whole-school management of behaviour in detail, they may not be using the process exactly as intended, which could cause frustration for them – or for others involved, be they students, parents or colleagues.

As an example, schools will usually have a process to deal with high-level incidents, such...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction: Unpicking the Big Conflict in Teaching
• Chapter 1: Understand Your Subject and How to Function in School
• Chapter 2: Plan and Deliver Lessons
• Chapter 3: Use Marking and Feedback to Ensure That Students Are on Track
• Chapter 4: Assess to See if Your Lessons Have Been Effective, and Use That to Inform Your Teaching, and Report Back to Parents and School Leadership
• Chapter 5: Manage Behavioural Issues
• Chapter 6: Have a Good Work–Life Balance Alongside Teaching
• Chapter 7: Lead Like You Imagined It
• Conclusion: Become the Teacher You Imagined
• Bibliography
• Copyright