I think it is fair to say that this term has been very difficult. Not so much the teaching – more the adjustment from trainee teacher with half a timetable, “nice” groups, less teaching, less planning and overall much less responsibility within school.
But that is not to say that I haven’t enjoyed almost every minute of it!
I think one of my favourite parts of becoming a “real” teacher is having my own tutor group. From the first day they all seemed lovely and I have really enjoyed getting to know each and every of them over the last 14 weeks (wow – writing that makes it sound like a long time).
I now know their strengths and weaknesses and I am really looking forward to getting to follow them as their form tutor for the next two and a half years.
I think so much of teaching can be seen as shaping students for success in later life and as a form tutor who stays with a tutor group for three years I really think I can get to play my part in this goal.
I have also loved having the opportunity to have my own classes. I think being a trainee makes it hard to establish rules and routines. Especially if you only teach one of three lessons each week. Instead you end up with unclear rules and I think sometimes the students can get confused as to who their teacher is.
Having my own groups has been a real highlight of my entry to teaching. Being able to establish my own classroom expectations and learning environment has really been great and I think this has contributed to even better behaviour for learning for the groups that I teach.
Tied in with this, I have benefited from continuity, as I taught some of my students as a trainee in my school last year and this has really helped. I am a familiar face around school and have been for over a year now. So I am not seen as a new teacher that students feel the need to test the boundaries with – as, I hope, they were already established last year.
These positive parts of school life have obviously come alongside some more unpleasant experiences – it wouldn’t be the NQT year without some trials and tribulations.
As I have spoken about previously in my weekly diary entries for SecEd, I had a clash with a student in a lesson pretty early on.
I let that student get away with far too much in my lesson and, on reflection, I think this was because I didn’t want them to feel that I was picking on them.
This is something that was on my mind for weeks and I couldn’t get it out of my head. I dwelled on it.
Ultimately, what I had done was not follow the rules that I had set for every student. I am still unsure why I did this.
Eventually, I dealt with the issue – I applied my normal rules, gave an after-school detention and put it behind me.
It is something that I still regret. However, addressing it was one of the best things I could have done. I think as a teacher it is really easy to run things over in your head again and again. We are constantly self-evaluating as we are taught to do in our training, but it is important not to dwell on mistakes too much – we must learn from them and move on.
Now, things are much better. The student is completely different in my lessons and much more on task and friendly. But I wish I had just stuck to my initial rules from the start and avoided an uncomfortable few weeks.
Another notable occurrence during this first term was a recent event that involved a student becoming upset about another student in the room. This, unfortunately, led to the student cursing at me after I attempted to resolve the situation.
These events are always disappointing and often unavoidable. Again, this is something I have played over and over in my head and it probably causes me more distress than it needs to. The thing I always tell myself is that the issue is almost never with me, the teacher. That student will have had something happen outside my lesson and that is usually what has triggered the behaviour.
So now we look onwards. To the spring term. The hardest term is over and now come the much shorter terms as we slowly work our way to the summer exams. What is quite exciting is that when you look at the school weeks, we are already almost half way through the school year (not that I’m wishing it away).
In the spring term I hope to really nail my classroom behaviour – hopefully implementing some behaviour for learning techniques that I am currently researching.
Looking further ahead I would like to get into more of a routine with homework and how it is marked. Potentially looking at some ICT programs to make the tasks easier and more seamless.
It has been hard, stressful and tiring, but I would not like to be doing anything other than teaching. Having said that, I think we can all agree that the two-week Christmas break is going to be embraced with open arms!
- SecEd’s NQT diarist this year is a teacher of science from a school in the Midlands. You can read his regular diary every week in SecEd and at www.sec-ed.co.uk/search/diary-of-an-nqt/
NQT Special Edition - November 2015
This article was published in November 2015 as part of SecEd's bi-annual NQT Special Edition, supported by the NASUWT. You can download a free PDF of all eight pages via our Supplements page: http://www.sec-ed.co.uk/supplements/