Firstly, a very warm welcome to the best job in the world. You will no doubt have experienced through your training year just how rewarding teaching is, and how challenging it can be (with or without a pandemic!)
In this series of posts I shall share a few tips for NQTs starting in September: some which made my life easier, and some which would have made my life easier had I known about them this time last year! I hope they will be useful. I shall start off with five. These tips are quite detailed, and the next five will be too but I shall also make sure I add a quick-fire list of handy practical tips that are quicker to digest.
Here are my first five tips to start you off:
1. Relax over the summer
This might seem a strange one to start with but I think it’s really important. I was lucky enough to have a July start and I remember jokingly saying on the last day of term, “this will be the one year I’m wishing away the summer holidays” because I was just chomping at the bit to get started! However, I made sure I took time over the summer to fully rest and recharge.
The start of term is very full-on and tiring, and the new routines that will be in place in schools because of Covid will undoubtedly make it even more so this year. While you will want to go in having done enough preparation to get you through your lessons for the first week or two, any more than this is pointless. You don’t know your students yet, so you may misjudge how much they will get done in a lesson – it’s better to have to tweak or replan a handful of lessons than a term’s worth.
Plus, if you haven’t taken the necessary rest to ensure you start in September with full batteries, you will be on your knees by October half term. You probably will be anyway, so best to limit the damage! And on that note, I dislocated one of mine in my first half term, so spent three weeks hobbling around my classroom with a giant contraption on my leg, couldn’t drive and it made all the basics of teaching (like moving around the school or just my room) exhausting in themselves, so I recommend you avoid that kind of damage too!
2. Learn your students’ names quickly (and some ideas to help)
Names are everything. I had class photos for all my groups except the new Year 7s and one of the things I did do over the summer was sit down, study them and test myself. It only took a few hours, but meant that on day one in September, I confidently knew about two thirds of my students’ names, and the rest followed quickly. This is a great tool for behaviour management, as “Adam, listen please” is going to be a lot more effective than “you there, next to the one in glasses” with a pointy finger.
It also shows your students that you care about them. In Year 7 as a student, I had one teacher who knew all our names by week two, and one who still didn’t know mine after three years! No prizes for guessing who was more respected by their students. If your headteacher came to speak to you half a term in but didn’t know your name, you would likely feel pretty undervalued. The same applies with you and your students. Knowing names is a must, and actively learning them should be a priority.
When learning names, I try to make a mental link between the student and their name. I made links to height, to hair colour, to glasses, to personality, to interactions I’ve had such as the student who told me which other languages his family speaks, or the student who saw me in the corridor and told me he was excited to have me as his French teacher. If there’s a link that creates alliteration or is otherwise easy to remember, even better. Of course, there are some students whose names you will learn very quickly thanks to their behaviour, but it shouldn’t take long to identify a link for everyone and sooner or later you won’t need to rely on them any more.
3. Set out your expectations clearly, and stick to them relentlessly
The first time students see you, they will be sussing you out. Take the time in the first lesson to set out your expectations, what will happen if they are met and what will happen if they are not. And stick to it. There will be students who test you to see what they can get away with. It’s understandable not to want to come across like a dragon on the first day, but speaking to another NQT in my school at the start of lockdown, we both said we wished we had been stricter at the start. Students value boundaries and consistency. If they perceive you to be inconsistent with how you apply the boundaries, they won’t hesitate to let you know! If you are firm but fair, you can’t go far wrong and the vast majority will meet your expectations the vast majority of the time.
4. Create routines to make transitions smooth
I am lucky to work in a school with a school-wide routine for the start of lessons (a silent retrieval activity for the first 5 mins), which meant that students know exactly what the expectation is and I just had to enforce it. As a result, the start of lessons were an area I rarely struggled with even at the beginning. Where I struggled was with mid-lesson transitions, for example pockets of chatter as mini-whiteboards were handed out, or as I went round checking homework had been done. Think about where these pockets could emerge and create routines to minimise the possibility of it happening. Set out these routines explicitly and explain why they are there. I changed my routine for collecting books in after Christmas to sharpen it up, but to make sure the students bought in, I explained how speeding this up would minimise wasted time at the start of lessons and maximise time available for learning and making progress. They knew why I had set a new expectation, so they went with it.
Here are some routines I established during the year:
- If I’m blanket checking homework completion, I ask them to hold it up and it only takes a few seconds to scan the room.
- I got zip-up pouches to store a row’s worth of mini-whiteboards in and gave a target time for students to hand them out in (this also gave them a focus, especially if I played them off against another class in their year group).
- Books were collected in seating order by row, and I put a sheet of cardboard in between each row, landscape so it would stick out. To hand them back out, I could just walk down the room during lesson changeover and put a pile at the end of each row. The first student to arrive in each row knew it was their responsibility to hand them out, and they could just walk along the row as the books were already in order. Job done in seconds.
5. Create a folder for ‘Nice things’ in your inbox
The NQT year will bring moments where you feel like everything is on top of you rather than the other way round. Perhaps a parent has complained or you’ve had a crash-and-burn lesson. These will both happen at some point, and it can be deflating.
However, there will be moments (hopefully many more of them!) where you will be appreciated, or receive some good feedback. If someone emails you to say how wonderful you are or thank you for something – the ones that make you smile and think ‘that’s a lovely email’ – put it into a folder ready for the less lovely moments when you find your motivation dropping. In those moments, open up your folder (mine is called ‘Nice things’) and read through these emails to remind yourself why you’re great and why this job is too.
It’s too easy to dwell on the negatives and important to pay just as much attention on the positives, as they really do outnumber the negatives by a long way.
That’s all for now…
That concludes my first set of hints for new NQTs, and on reflection most of them are very generic and not pandemic-related at all. I will add my next set in the coming days, but if you have any questions in the meantime that I could address in the next posts, or if you are a more experienced teacher and have your own tips to share, or if you just want to start a discussion, please feel free to leave a comment.
Hashmançais 