How to Survive Teacher Training
By: N.J. Edwards
Tags: Education, Teacher Training, Life Lessons, Professional Development, Teaching

Every lesson shapes a life. Or so they say.

Teacher training can be one of the most challenging and exhausting years of your life. Juggling different school placements, academic learning, essay writing and lesson planning. Meeting large groups of new people and building relationships with them — school teachers, coaches, mentors, lecturers and the students themselves. It’s busy. It’s intense.

Standing up in front of thirty children for the first time is terrifying. They probably know you are a trainee teacher. Let’s face it, the petrified look on your face is a dead giveaway.

Then there are the names. The hundreds of different names. Some of them are even the same name but just pronounced differently. ‘Leah’ was a big problem for me. I never knew if it was pronounced ‘Le-ah’ or ‘Lay-ah’. To make things even more difficult there was a ‘Le-ah’ on the register. To be pronounced ‘Le-dash-ah’, they told me with a straight face.

Teacher training is tough and can be a time of high stress. I shed some tears, but I made it through. Some are not so fortunate. Teachers continue to drop out of the profession at an alarming rate, even during training. On my course alone, roughly 30% of student teachers failed to make it to the end.

Here are some tips to help you through your first year teaching.

1) Collate and share school resources

It’s likely as a subject group you will have access to the resources of multiple schools. Collating resources from different schools will save each of you hours of preparation. You can mix and match similar lessons to suit your style and class, rather than rely on limited and sometimes outdated content in a single school. There is value-creating lessons from scratch, but we all need inspiration.

Create an account on a file-sharing site such as Dropbox. Give access to everyone learning to teach the same subject as you. Next, individually upload the entire contents of your school’s shared-area for that subject. Failing that, use large USB sticks or external hard-drives and upload it all at home. Get everyone who teaches your subject to do this or as many as possible. This will be invaluable later in the year. Do this as soon as possible.

2) Don’t share your own personal resources.

If you have spent hours preparing a lesson from scratch and a colleague needs a lesson, don’t just hand it over. By all means, share the odd slide or exercise. Work together, give advice, but don’t give away the full package. Whilst I would encourage sharing existing resources, the reality is that you will soon be competing against one another for jobs at the best schools. Keep your own resources close to your chest. This is a competition.

3) Get comfortable with being uncomfortable

The sooner you do this, the easier it will be. Teacher training often does this naturally by throwing you into the deep end from day one. Move towards embarrassment in your teaching, rather than trying to avoid it. Once you get comfortable being uncomfortable, even the most challenging of classroom events will not phase you.

Students are whispering and looking at you strangely because you have snot hanging out of your nose. Don’t stress. Ask them what’s going on and laugh at yourself. Self-deprecation mixed with confidence in the classroom is a winning combination.

4) Teach the same lesson multiple times

Granted this is only possible if you teach multiple classes in the same year. If you are lucky enough to be in this position, you can then reflect on what worked and what didn’t, improving your performance the next time.

This is particularly useful for building confidence. In teaching experience counts. Once you have taught a certain topic once, it’s easier the next time.

5) Don’t be a perfectionist.

The perfect lesson does not exist. Even if you have planned for four hours straight, designed and produced original resources and practised the lesson with another class. It could still fall flat on its face.

Teaching is unpredictable. There are so many variables you can’t control. The time of day/year, last nights game, the fight in the previous lesson, Tik-Tok, Fortnite, the weather. The list is endless. One thing’s for sure, rain outside tends to lead to bad behaviour inside.

Average lessons are OK. Average lessons are good.

6) Experiment

The further you get through the year, the more you should be experimenting. Try an ambitious lesson. Use a different tone of voice. Get them out of their seats and moving. Go outside. Get them to sing. It may go horribly wrong, you don’t know if you don’t try.

Teacher training is the best time to do this — you are not even a real teacher yet, it doesn’t matter. There’s even another teacher observing (most of the time) who can step in if it gets really bad. It’s also fun. Enjoy the chaos.

This also applies to behaviour management. Turns out shouting might actually work for you because you have a scary voice. Try removing students from the classroom on occasion. Maybe there is a good time to let them listen to music via headphones. Move them around and use different seating plans.

Experiment with your teaching but always be consistent with your punishments. All children care about when it comes to discipline is fairness.

7) Don’t be afraid to make sacrifices

If you want to continue to have a reasonable social-life and spend time with your family, friends or children, you need to prioritise.

For example, you are on your second school placement and you are still writing full-lesson plans. Writing the plan is taking as long as creating the lesson. Stop. Use a template and roughly cut and paste from previous plans. Paperwork, whilst important to keep at a minimum standard, is clearly not as important as your teaching.

If you need to put less effort into a particular lesson don’t judge yourself. You are not letting anyone down. There are only so many hours in a day.

8) Set yourself non-negotiable time management rules

It would be easy to work every second of the day in your teacher training year. You need to set some rules at the beginning and stick with them. No matter what.

Do what works best for you. My rules were absolutely no lesson planning after 9 pm or on Saturdays. Gym twice a week at a fixed time. Non-negotiable.

You have to lead a year assembly in the morning and you would like to prepare more and its 9 pm? Tough. No more. Nothing is more important than keeping on top of your physical and mental health.