Best Practice

New teachers: Surviving your first year

Alison Wood has just begun her second year of teaching at a school in Scotland. In this article, she offers her advice to this year’s cohort of new teachers to help them survive and thrive during their first year at the chalkface

My probation year was hard work, but I survived, and loved it. Here are nine tips which I think would have helped me at the start of it.

At the start of my year last August, I worked well into the evenings and was much more likely to work on a Sunday, preparing lessons. However, as the year went on, I realised this made me miserable.

Two things helped: first, I realised that some things just can’t be done. If I have a long to-do list and there are things that don’t need to be done for the next day then they just get scrapped.

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