Become the Primary Teacher Everyone Wants to Have

A guide to career success

Sean Delaney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317198666
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

No matter how much you want to teach and no matter how well prepared you are, beginning teaching is tough. A teacher's work is never done; even when you work hard, there is always something more you could do. Become the Primary Teacher Everyone Wants to Have tells you what teaching is really like.

As you set out on your teaching career, this book offers thoughtful and sensible support from an experienced and sympathetic teacher. Whether you read the book through from cover to cover or dip into sections you need at particular times, each page has suggestions and ideas to help you lay a solid foundation for a fruitful and fulfilling career in teaching. Chapters cover:

• Getting Ready for Teaching;
• Teaching to Reach All Children;
• Assessing Learning and Teaching;
• Communicating with Parents and Guardians about Teaching;
• Relating with Colleagues when Teaching;
• Integrating Life, Teaching and Learning.

This book will be an invaluable guide for newly qualified and experienced teachers alike who are wanting to develop their practice and thrive in teaching.

1

Getting ready for teaching

Where your teaching is going

A newly qualified teaching friend of mine, working as a substitute teacher for three months, was visited in a city school by an inspector as part of her induction programme. The inspector asked to see the beginning teacher’s long-term written planning. ‘I don’t have it’, she said, ‘I usually just plan my work from day to day’. The inspector, who was nearing retirement, made no comment and continued with the visit looking through the notes she had. He observed her teaching and generally seemed quite pleased with how she was doing. He got up to leave, shook her hand and wished her well. As he was leaving the classroom, the inspector turned to my friend and asked, ‘By the way, I’m heading to C______ from here, naming a city about 200 km away. What’s the best way to get there?’.

‘When you leave the school grounds, turn right and go to the end of that road and turn left at the T-junction’, she began. ‘Then continue straight ahead until you come to the third set of traffic lights and turn right. Oh, no, that may be a one-way street. Actually, I’m not exactly sure; I’d need to take a few minutes to think it through’, she continued.

‘That’s what long-term planning is like’, he said. ‘It helps keep you on the right road as you travel towards your destination’. He smiled and headed off having imparted a lesson to the teacher that she remembers almost thirty years later.

When teaching a class, your destination could be the final day of the school year. Or your target might be to complete the last page of every textbook. Or maybe your destination is reached when all children have achieved a set of specified objectives. More important perhaps than the destination is the journey you undertake with the children over the course of a school year together. Children don’t think about where their education is leading them; their primary concern is about the experiences they are having now.

As the teacher, your job is to navigate. Although the destination is unclear or unknown at the start of the year, you have resources to guide you: a curriculum, textbooks, a school plan, other school policy documents, your knowledge of education, your beliefs about how children learn, the goals you want to achieve and your ideas about creating worthwhile experiences for the children.

Covering the curriculum

‘But don’t I just have to cover the curriculum?’ you might ask, and to some extent that is the case. Nevertheless, although variations and limitations exist from country to country, teachers typically have flexibility to make judicious choices about what topics to cover. Your teaching may be influenced by factors such as events in the world around you, the school location, the school type, the circumstances of the children, the class size and the class level(s) you’re teaching. When teaching geography, for example, you will want to develop children’s geographical thinking but the specific content you use to do this will be influenced by geographical features specific to the area in which you teach. Other subjects, such as mathematics, may require a more comprehensive, sequential approach.

Your written notes are a record of how you intend to mediate the curriculum for your students across all subjects. A well-written plan of work won’t guarantee that you teach well, but it gives direction to your work.

Planning as problem solving

Although most teacher preparation programmes encourage teachers to begin their planning with aims and objectives, many teachers plan their teaching in a less linear way.¹ Most teachers focus on activities they will use in the classroom with the children and this leads them to engage in identifying problems, solving problems, implementing solutions, and evaluating solutions.²

The kind of problem to be solved may be how to explain to children in science class what a fungus is and how it grows. Or it may be how to use the available materials to help the children practise throwing and catching in physical education. When trying to solve these problems of teaching, you will draw on your knowledge of the children, the curriculum, the resources available and the classroom setting. The solution to such problems is the plan you devise to teach a particular idea to the children in your class. When you implement the plan, you try to monitor how well it’s working; maybe you’ll use it again, maybe you won’t, or maybe you’ll modify it.

TABLE 1.1 Options for content of long-term and short-term planning

	Planning
	Long-term	Short-term
Option A	Identify teaching problems	Identify detailed solutions to teaching problems
Option B	Identify detailed solutions to teaching problems	Identify problems of teaching and refer to solutions contained in the long-term plans

The level of detail you place in your long-term and short-term planning for teaching will depend on how you like to plan. You might begin your long term plan by identifying teaching ‘problems’ to be solved later – simply listing topics you would like to teach the children – such as the Bronze Age, skills of tennis, long multiplication or how to write a story (Option A in Table 1.1).

Alternatively, your long-term plan may record detailed solutions to problems of teaching, which identify how chosen topics will be taught: stating what you expect children to already know, the amount of content to be introduced, the teaching sequence of the content, the teaching methods to be employed, the materials to use and the tasks to set (Option B in Table 1.1). Whether your long-term plan identifies only the topics you’ll teach (‘problems’ of teaching) or the detailed specifications of how you’ll teach them (solutions to the problems) will depend on how far in advance you like to plan. At the outset of your career, long-term plans may identify planning problems and short-term plans propose solutions.

Planning as composing

Another perspective on planning compares teaching to the creative arts. Seen in this way, teaching is a composing process and planning is its first step. Before writing a first draft, a writer generates and organises ideas. This is the prewriting stage.³ It equates to the planning stage in teaching. The actual teaching is the first draft of the composition, and subsequently it may be revised.⁴

Templates for planning

When we set about planning, many of us dislike being faced with a blank page to fill; therefore templates can be helpful as a way to scaffold your preparation. You can choose from many templates when planning your teaching⁵ or you may use one you found helpful in college. A standard template may make your planning easier for other people to read, such as mentors, principals or assessors. If using a template supports you in generating ideas, then use the template.

But as you gain experience, you may prefer the freedom to plan on a blank page, in a more idiosyncratic way; that should be acceptable too. Standardised templates risk constraining or homogenising how teachers think about their planning. And constrained planning could lead to constrained teaching – teaching that is flat, lifeless or without personality.

No matter how a scheme is written, the reason for writing it is to focus your thoughts and remind you afterwards of key points. The real plan is not the one on a page but the one in your head. That is what counts when you and the children interact with each other. Your planning is the prelude for such interaction because whether you see teaching as problem solving or composition, planning helps you generate ideas for teaching.

Planning versus preparation

The idea of planning leads some people to assume that you can predict precisely what will happen in the classroom between you, the children and the content in your classroom setting. But teaching is rarely predictable. You need to be prepared for teaching but also ready to respond to unexpected or random occurrences in class. A child might be sick. A child may ask questions you cannot answer. A child may know a song, a story or a website that reinforces a key point in a lesson. Such events can unsettle or enhance your planning. Although the terms planning and preparation are used interchangeably, they are not necessarily the same; planning comes from a rational, objectives model, whereas preparation is about getting ready for action.⁶

Preparation is sensitive to where the teaching is happening and responsive to children in the class. When you are prepared for teaching, your subsequent classroom performance resembles disciplined improvisation⁷ – like actors performing improvisational theatre or jazz musicians playing at a concert. You respond to what is happening in the classroom, in a way that is informed by your knowledge of the subject, of the curriculum, of children and of teaching, and by your experience to date. Your experience equips you with patterns you can draw on to inform how you think and act in a new situation⁸ and as you gain experience, your repertoire grows.

The preparation and improvisation are accompanied by contemplation, where you give yourself time and space to consider the possibilities of what happened in practice in this place.⁹ Contemplation differs from reflection in that reflection tends to be an outside, detached view of what happened and contemplation is a view from inside, and more holistic.¹⁰ The origins of the words give clues as to their meanings. Contemplation happened in a dedicated, consecrated place where you looked at something and considered it with a view to the future. The origins of reflection have to do with bending back or turning back one’s thoughts.¹¹

When you prepare for teaching the children in a particular class, you will probably consult a variety of books, including textbooks, which are available to you. Textbooks and the associated teacher manuals can provide structure and stimuli to support your preparation. They offer question prompts, recommend sources to consult, and present tasks for children to complete. Although textbooks are written specifically for use with children in a classroom setting and their language is age-appropriate, the information they contain is often dry, sketchy and simplistic.

History textbooks, for example, rarely show how historians disagree on the interpretation of events and the challenge of tasks in most textbooks is set at a low level. That’s why it’s helpful to draw on additional sources such as your college notes, books for a general readership, reliable websites and the curriculum to select possible activities and materials to use. Such sources are a great help for planning schemes of work tailored to your teaching strengths, your class, your materials and your interests.

Long- and short-term planning

Most teachers write two kinds of scheme of work. A long-term scheme of work offers a way to think about and express the work you will do with your class in the coming year or the coming term. A short-term scheme of work does the same for the coming fortnight or week. I generally prepared two long-term schemes of work each year, one from September to December, and one from January to the end of the school year. For short-term planning I preferred fortnightly schemes of work to weekly ones because in addition to halving the number of schemes I had to write, one week is quite short for exploring topics in depth in most curriculum areas.

Another choice to make is whether to write detailed long-term schemes of work and summary short-term schemes of work, or to write long-term schemes of work in summary form and flesh out the detail week by week or fortnight by fortnight (see Table 1.1). In other words, do you try and solve as many teaching problems as you can at the start of the year and term, or do you prefer to identify the problems at the start and solve them weekly or fortnightly throughout the year? This decision depends on how you like to work.

You can put in a lot of work at the start of the year or the start of the term, when your energy level is high, and research several topics in great detail. Then your short-term preparation will refer to the detail in your long-term scheme, meaning that every week or fortnight only minor adaptations to your planning are needed. Alternatively, if you plan the detailed content every week or fortnight, that content may be fresher in your mind when it comes to teaching it and it can be more responsive to children’s interests and ideas.

You could show short-term schemes of work to the children. Perhaps your draft schemes could be projected on the whiteboard and discussed with children in older classes. Would you write the scheme differently if you knew the children were going to see it? In some settings children can use a textbook to predict what topics are coming up in a subject but in other settings or subjects, the topics may be new. It would provide the children with a different perspective on their school work and they may offer some useful feedback on the content of the scheme.

A step further would be to involve the children in preparing the scheme with you. Take twenty minutes at the end of the fortnight to discuss what they have learned over the previous two weeks and what they know about upcoming topics. They may even have suggestions about teaching strategies and they may be able ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• A note on the author
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Getting ready for teaching
• Chapter 2 Creating an atmosphere for teaching
• Chapter 3 Choosing ways of teaching
• Chapter 4 Teaching to reach all children
• Chapter 5 Reinforcing teaching at home
• Chapter 6 Assessing learning and teaching
• Chapter 7 Communicating with parents and guardians about teaching
• Chapter 8 Relating with colleagues when teaching
• Chapter 9 Integrating life, teaching and learning
• Appendix I: Teaching reading to children
• Appendix II: Beginning to teach mathematics
• Appendix III: Setting up for teaching in early childhood education
• Appendix IV: Independent study strategies for children to learn
• Appendix V: Twenty sample tasks
• Index