The Art of Being a Brilliant Teacher

(The Art of Being Brilliant series)

Andy Cope, Gary Toward, Chris Henley

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781845909413
• eBook ISBN: 9781845909499
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Teaching is an art; with the right techniques, guidance, skills and practice, teachers can masterfully face any situation the classroom could throw at them. With their fresh perspectives, sage advice and a hint of silliness, Andy, Chris and Gary show teachers how to unleash their brilliance.

For any teacher who has ever had a class that are angels for colleagues but Lucifer incarnate as soon as they cross the threshold of their classroom. Or who realised too late that their best-laid lesson plans were doomed from the start. Or who had their energy and enthusiasm sapped by a mood-hoovering staffroom Grinch. These problems will be a thing of the past once they've mastered the art of being a brilliant teacher. With plenty of practical advice and top tips, this book will show them how.

Click here to view other titles in our successful Art of Being Brilliant series.

The Art of Being Brilliant series was a finalist in the 2017 Education Resources Awards in the Educational Book Award category.

Chapter 1

SPAGHETTI JUNCTION

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.

Albert Einstein

We desperately want you to read this book; not to make us fabulously wealthy,1 but to help you become an even better educator. But why should you read it? This introductory chapter sets out our very simple philosophy, our aims and why we have chosen the writing style that we have. We describe the book’s unique selling points and remind you that we are very much grounded on planet realism. Somewhat counter-intuitively we will be encouraging you to think inside the box. We acknowledge that you may not like our continual reference to baby goats and that we tell a cool story about Kung Fu Panda. And let’s face it, there aren’t many books that name-check The Waltons and Jeremy Kyle in the first chapter! This is all topped off with some thought-provoking stuff about spaghetti junction and how your brilliance can ripple way beyond the school boundaries. Brace yourself!

Let us guess? You’re busy. A to-do-list-longer-than-both-arms busy. And while we totally understand the pressures that come with the territory of teaching, busyness is exactly why you need to take time out to absorb these pages. You might like to think of this book as ‘everything you wanted to know about teaching but never dared ask’. It’s pretty much a pick-and-mix cornucopia of all of the things we feel teachers should know. Actually, let’s rephrase that: it’s what we think brilliant teachers should know.

We sincerely hope you enjoy our book. We are advocates of borrowing other people’s ideas – tweaking, improving and integrating them to create world class lessons. And while we don’t claim that it is a definitive text, or that we have solutions to all the teaching and learning questions in the world, we promise there is some cracking stuff coming up. And it’s yours for the taking, so help yourself! Experiment away. We reckon that’s how world class teachers become world class.

As well as giving you oodles of ideas, this book is also designed to make you think. And we mean really think about you and your career, as well as the impact you have on children and colleagues. But we reckon teachers are sick to death of being asked to do more for less, and continually ‘thinking outside the box’ has become a clichéd no-no. So, we’ve decided to sprinkle in some world class thinking inside the box, meaning you’ll get an occasional joke, quote, short story or something out of the ordinary – often a bit like this:

You spend a seventh of your life on Mondays. That’s too many to waste on feeling miserable, so why not bring your Friday attitude to the staffroom on Monday: ‘Thank God it’s Monday!’

In the big scheme of your life, teaching is part-time, whereas living is your full-time occupation. The trouble with the job of living is that it is not a permanent position, so we want to encourage you to make the most of it while you’ve still got it. In essence, we want to get you excited about living first, and then tackle the challenges of teaching. What you will realise is that, if you get excited about being alive, the challenges of teaching seem much easier to cope with!

We wanted to write a book that all teachers would find useful: primary, secondary, tertiary; young, middle or, ahem, experienced; inner city or posh leafy suburbs. Ultimately, if there’s one question this book sets out to help you answer it is, ‘How can I be a more effective teacher?’ or, more pertinently, ‘How can I be even more brilliant?’

Our style

Before we begin, a few points about our writing style. First, we’ve deliberately given the book a light touch. If you want a tome on emotional literacy, the eight intelligences or safeguarding children in the twenty-first century, this book is not for you. If you want a review of government white papers since 1821, this book is not for you. We’re coming at this from the point of view that the last thing a busy teacher who wants to be brilliant needs is a whole load of academic twaddle or a history of government policy.

Neither have we set out to rant about how schools are being badly run or about how successive governments have tinkered with the education system. And it’s not about being a maverick teacher who shuns the rules, ignores the syllabus and sticks two fingers up at the inspectors. We don’t want you to rebel against the system, but rather to shine within the system. We have steered towards simplicity, inspiration and common sense. Rather than two fingers up, we have our fingers crossed! We hope you’re up for a big bit of fun? While there have been three heads involved in writing this book, we share a common philosophy and we are speaking with one voice. Quite simply, between us we have around ninety years of experience to bring to the table, and we’d like to share it with you.

We hope you’re up for some fun too! It’s a funny thing, humour. We understand that it’s very personal, but we hope you appreciate that we’re trying to get our messages across with as much energy as possible and that you enter into the spirit of what we’re trying to do – namely, inject some light-heartedness into a subject that can, at times, be very serious indeed.

If you think something is missing in your life, it is probably you!

Robert Holden

It was also very important for us to write this book from a practical viewpoint. In terms of experience, Chris and Gary count themselves as veterans of the teaching profession; young at heart and passionate about the whole business of education, but veterans nonetheless. While many teachers seem to get ground down by the relentless pressures of the job, we’ve all managed to retain an enthusiasm (a zest even) and that has been reflected in the results we’ve achieved.

What we’ve written here is true. We’ve reflected on the best and worst of our combined years of experience. The advice is tried and tested: it works for us. Andy brings another dimension. We think the fact that he’s not a teacher (well, strictly speaking he is a qualified teacher, but he escaped at the teacher training stage) adds hugely to our combined thinking. Andy brings ideas about positivity, happiness and flourishing to the table and has ended up coming full circle: working with schools to help them raise levels of motivation and aspiration, to help them to be brilliant. Although he came back into education with the aim of inspiring children, the irony is that it is often the teachers who need the most help! So, Andy adds a unique perspective. He comes with a wealth of experience in the business and academic world, and his job is to make you stop and think about your own behaviours and attitudes.

Finally, and most crucially, in any school the most important people in it are actually the kids, or should it be the students, or maybe the pupils? We use all of these terms because it’s what we say in our job, and so will most teachers. If you’re irked by the fact that ‘kids’ are, technically, baby goats, we urge you to get over it. ‘Kids’ are why we come to work, and we are proud that they feature strongly in the following pages.

What planet are we on?

Thankfully, the same planet as you! All three of us are coming at teaching from a real world perspective. We don’t live in some happy-cl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Richard Gerver
• The Warmest of Welcomes
• 1: Spaghetti Junction
• 2: Zombie Apocalypse
• 3: Climate Change
• 4: Let the Force Be With You
• 5: The Devil’s in the Detail
• 6: Rules of Engagement
• 7: Have You Got Your Discipline Yet?
• 8: The Class from Hell
• 9: And Finally
• About the Authors
• Copyright