Top 10 Tips to Survive as a Teacher

Teaching is tough! It doesn’t matter the age of the pupils you’re teaching or the type of school you are in, the job is hard. It’s really difficult to communicate to a non-teacher just how all-consuming the job is, or why you can’t switch off from it when you get home. It’s also difficult for others to comprehend just how many problems, questions, demands and stresses you deal with in the average lesson, let alone the full school day or a year! So, here are my top ten tips for keeping your sanity whilst teaching the future Einsteins of today!

1) For anyone starting off as a new teacher its important to realise that things do get better. Everything gets easier and quicker and you’ll soon discover that something that used to take multiple hours, now only takes you a few minutes. This is especially true for planning. I remember scrutinising each individual lesson plan and writing them all up with every possible differentiation technique I could squeeze in and each with their own individualised resources. I would run the lesson over and over again in my head before I taught it and would, in some cases, even dream about it the night before! This all passes. Planning takes minutes, not hours and no, differentiation and individualising work never goes away, but it no longer requires the same amount of brain space anymore. You can begin to reuse things you’ve done before and you can remember ideas and lessons that have worked well in the past and execute them quickly and simply. Push through the initial planning – hang in there!

2) For lower ability groups, keep everything logical and simple. When I was training, one major mistake I made was that I would develop and set individual tasks and exercises. I never really considered the journey. This is really important. Your students will get so much more out of the lesson if they can see where it is going and identify with the steps you’re taking. Keep it simple and start off with something you know they can all do. Give them a 5 minutes starter activity to get them on side. This boosts confidence and instantly makes them feel like they can achieve. Your pupils are aware of their own limitations and struggles – if they already think they can’t do the subject and then you give them something at the start of a lesson that they can’t do, you’re going to lose them.

Blooms Taxonomy Pyramid

3. Linked to number 2 – use Blooms Taxonomy as a lesson planning structure. This is a nice easy way to build up activities in the classroom. It supports lower ability pupils as well as pushing those who are needing an extra challenge. In addition, it makes a really nice building block to encouraging your young pupil to think about ideas critically and in more detail. They won’t even realise you’re leading them there and they’ll leave the room feeling as if they’ve made progress and have achieved something. (This, obviously, looks great if you also happen to be observed…).

4. This does not rule your life! Yes, it’s an important job. Yes, you’re going to care really deeply for your students and worry about their decisions and exam results and difficult home-lives, but you also have a life too. Your parents still need to see you, your children still need your time and you, also, need to maintain your social life and hobbies. Many people during your training will tell you –

“teaching is a lifestyle, not a job!”

…I hate that phrase!

It’s a way of telling you that you should live, sleep and breathe the job. If you want to, fine, go ahead. If you don’t, then make your own rules. I ban work at the weekends. Sometimes, you have no choice but to break them (like I had to this weekend when I was left with a rather large pile of yr 11 mock exams and no time in the working week to mark them), but you should try to stick to it. Work your own hours outside of school time and decide when enough is enough. A sick teacher is a useless teacher, so if that means you need to have a couple of complete evenings to yourself to rejuvenate and recover, then so be it.

5. Get out of your own department. It’s so easy to get stuck only observing and watching lessons within your own subject, but you will get better ideas of what works (and what doesn’t) if you step outside of your own office and venture into another building or corridor. Go and see what others are doing to reduce their marking or give effective feedback as you can quite often take the idea and adapt it so that it works for you or your subject.

6. If you’re in a writing heavy subject, like English, then you’re going to have to find survival tactics for marking. You cannot physically mark every sentence, that every pupil, in every class is going to produce. It’s huge and you will soon feel like you’re drowning in a sea of poorly written and mind-numbingly boring stories. Marking is a particularly large problem when it comes to large exam classes. You want to set them practice essays and questions, but when are you going to be able to mark them? Sometimes the simple answer is, you’re not. So you have to get them to pick out their own, and their partner’s, strengths and weaknesses. They can’t do this alone though, you need to train them to know what they’re looking for. Give them success criteria.

For example:

“I want you to scan through your own work and identify comparisons you’ve made in your essay and highlight them”.

Once they’ve done that you can get them to evaluate how effective those comparisons are and guide them through the process. Soon they’ll have written all over their own work and will be able to edit it themselves. That’s a whole batch of exam questions marked and it’s only taken you 30 minutes of careful planning – preferable to 4 hours of painstaking marking!

7. Relationships with your pupils are very important. You’re going to find yourself with a whole heap of behaviour management issues if you don’t offer your pupils the respect they deserve. Teenagers are complex. They’re dealing with changes that are big and scary and they’re trying to establish themselves as young adults who are being asked to face exams that will determine their next steps in life. Some will rise to the challenge, be pro-active and focused and everything you want them to be. Others will stick their head in the sand, get angry, lash out, think that it’s pointless to even try. Don’t get angry, understand them. Be interested in their lives, ask them what they did at the weekend, how they celebrated their birthday, whether they enjoyed a football game or book. All of this tells that young person that you care about them. For a few minutes a day, don’t let the upcoming exams become more important than the human being you have in front of you.

8.

“Don’t smile before Christmas.”

A common piece of advice often batted about but this is not to be taken literally. Although, with this one, you have to be careful. You have to establish your boundaries and classroom rules quickly. If you let things slip at the very beginning, it’s almost impossible to claw it back from the brink of chaos. Believe it or not, pupils actually like the strictest teachers the most. They need direction and guidance and if you’re treating your students like you want to be their best mate, you’re not going to fulfill this role and they probably won’t respect you. They don’t need more friends; they need a teacher. If you start off accidentally too strict, you can always relax and ease off in future lessons, it’s always better to be too strict than not strict enough. You can smile though, you’re not a robot. You can still have clear rules, boundaries and high expectation and be a happy, smiley person. You don’t have to be miserable.

9. Kahoot is a marvelous invention and kids love it! It’s essentially an online, interactive quiz, you set the questions about any topic you are studying and they log on either on their smart phone, tablet or laptop and they play along in the class. They can choose their own nicknames (that can be a little bit scary!) or you can have nicknames randomly generated for peace of mind, and then they all play together and the programme ranks them against their peers. At the end of each question their names come up at the front in a leaderboard and they get very competitive about trying to beat each other. It’s makes for a great lesson and I now have to make one at the end of every term or my classes get upset!

10. Enjoy it! You’re in a great job. For some pupils you are one of the few constants and consistencies in their lives. They rely on you and they care about you and that’s a great honour. Make links with other schools, be ambitious, be kind and don’t get bogged down in the numbers and the data all the time. It’s important, because we’re measured on it, but the real important thing is the young people in your classroom.