Teachers Best Practices

Blog

  • What’s the point of Sats?

    Some people argue that Sats are cruel because they stress young children out, damage their education and demoralise teachers. There is some truth in this and it looks as though MPs are finally talking about it seriously. Having 11 years olds going through the key stage 2 tests puts an awful lot of pressure on them, and the teachers. Some young students are spending all of their free time preparing for the tests but getting not a lot from it. Too much education and pressure at such a young age can have the opposite effect which many parents argue is the case. It can make students become bored and anxious, and MPs are finally waking up to the fact that Sats are all about the school and nothing to do with the pupils. Hopefully Sats will be completely removed in the next few years as media coverage grows around the issue.

  • Building relationships with parents

    If you look at schools which are very successful, where pupils work hard, make progress and do well, then it is likely that relationships with parents and carers are highly valued. Although there may be some parents who believe that their children’s education should be left solely for schools to deal with and that the teacher is entirely responsible for teaching reading, writing and maths, most parents understand that their child’s success and happiness at school will rely on good parental support at home as well as strong, consistent teaching at school.

    If you are a newly qualified teacher in your early twenties, dealing with parents may seem quite daunting, especially when you may lack experience of having children of your own. However, you need to remember that you are the one who is the expert on education and who has a good understanding of how children learn. Do make sure you are approachable to all the parents of the children in your class. For some parents, their own schools days were not happy ones and some find talking to their child’s class teacher a difficult prospect. Remember as well, that you may have some parents who lack confidence in their own skills and may,for whatever reason, find English and maths difficult.

    Good schools will communicate well and will support staff to have good relationships with parents and carers by allowing opportunities for parents to come in to school. There may be assemblies or performances for parents to attend where they can proudly watch their offspring on stage. Open days allow parents to come in and look at their child’s work at leisure. Some schools will also offer opportunities to explain about the Curriculum and explain how parents can help their children in constructive ways.

  • Learning to teach phonics

    Even if you are embarking on a primary school teacher training degree or early years degree course straight after A levels, it is likely that phonics is something that will be completely new to you. Since 2012, the phonics screener test has been administered in schools to year 1 children towards the end of the academic year. Most schools teach phonics to all Foundation Stage and Key stage 1 children in short 20-25  minute sessions, 4 or 5 times a week.

    According to the Department for Education, phonics is a way to teach children to read quickly and skilfully. Reception aged children are taught the initial sounds of the letters of the alphabet, though not in alphabetical order and they will gradually learn to read and write simple consonant-vowel-consonant words (CVCs), by learning how to blend these sounds together. They then move on to look at other letter combinations, like ch, or, ar – these 2 letter single sounds are known as digraphs. Trigraphs are sounds which contain 3 letters – igh, air and ure, for instance.

    Once the basics are mastered, then phonics lessons move onto the finer intricacies of the English language.

    However, as a trainee teacher who was never taught phonics at school, this can all seem a little like learning a foreign language.  However, it doesn’t take long to pick up the basics and find ways to teach this to young children.  There are lots of phonics resources and games available to either buy or to download from popular teaching websites to help new trainee teachers .

  • Unqualified teachers

    You may feel concerned to learn that your child might be taught by someone without a recognised teaching qualification. There are approximately 17,000 unqualified teachers working in schools in England which is just under 4% of the total teaching workforce.

    The government believes that it is essential that schools have the freedom to employ whom they want to teach in their schools and it is certainly true that some unqualified teachers offer outstanding teaching and learning opportunities to the children in their classes. In theory, you must have a teaching qualification to teach in a local authority school whereas this is not always the case in an academy or a free school. However, in 2013 there were more than 9,000 teachers working in local authority schools in England. Many schools may often have unqualified teachers working in specialist subjects like music, sport, art or minority foreign languages.

    Parents, however, may understandably feel concerned if they think unqualified teachers are employed solely as a cost-cutting exercise. Salaries for qualified teachers start at around £22,000 p/a whilst an unqualified teacher may earn as little as £16,000 a year.

  • A few Tips on Improving Revision Time

    Whether you’re a teacher looking to update your advice for revision, or a student looking to improve your process, one of the best ways to start improving your revision time is to look at the findings of Psychologists. This is because psychologists spend their time researching how the brain works, including how the processes of learning and memorisation, and therefore revision, works.

    Research can tell us a lot about the ways in which revision isn’t as effective as it perhaps should be for certain people. For instance, 27% of boys and 39% of girl skip breakfast, and this is in spite of the wealth of evidence indicating its importance for mental activities throughout the rest of the day.

    Another big reason why we aren’t necessarily having as successful revision sessions as most people would have 30 or 40 years ago is because we have a lot more distractions available now. Information and entertainment is available at your fingertips throughout the day, no matter where you are, and this is clearly a double-edged sword when you’re trying to learn a subject.

    Doing your revision in a mad rush in the day or days running up to crunch time is also ill-advised. Evidence shows that repeatedly reinforcing information over long stretches of time is the most effective learning method; it also means that you are able to take a generally more relaxed approach to revision; spending just a couple of hours every couple of days going over your material.

    Surprisingly, teaching is actually one of the most effective ways of improving your understanding of a subject. In psychological circles, the affect of this is known as the “protege effect”, and it can be a massive help for reinforcing recently learned information.

    Last of all, and perhaps most importantly, is to remember to get adequate sleep. Without enough sleep humans can quickly lose a lot of the attention span, and thereby limit the productivity of any time they spend revising, so make sure that you get your 7-8 hours a day!

     

  • Best Places to Work for Teachers

    When trying to decide upon criteria for how we answer the question of where the best places for teachers to work are, the most important factor to consider is teacher satisfaction. This can give you a pretty accurate idea of the experiences that those in the profession have, but besides this area; teacher pay, opportunities for career development, work environment and the average hours worked can all give you added context.

    Arguably the most important factor in a teacher’s degree of satisfaction is how their role is perceived in the context of the wider society. Countries where teachers are seen as part of the elite, or at the very least are respected as important members of society, generally show much higher teacher satisfaction. This is borne out in places like China, where teachers are seen as highly important, and Luxembourg, where teachers are seen as the elite.

    Another important part is the remuniation teachers receive. This, in many ways, is not just about ensuring that a teacher can afford a high quality of life as it can play a big role in how teachers perceive the amount of respect they receive in society. If they see that other graduate level professions receive far larger pay packages, dissatisfaction will quickly follow.

    Work environment; the day to day grind of what teachers go through, can vary a lot depending upon the country/education body in question. Research shows that respect in the classroom is very important in this area. In addition, not having too much administrative work to do can have a big bearing on how good the work environment is.

  • Taking your First Step Into a Teaching Career

    One thing that is clear to everyone is that teaching is not the career for everyone. The position requires people who are prepared to work in a pretty stressful environment and remain completely reasonable, which is a smaller portion of the public than you might expect. Typically teachers will work long hours too, as they try to work to manage classrooms, which takes up the school day, and then spend a couple of hours in the evening or early morning planning out lessons.

    Because of all of these potential reasons not to become a teacher, if you’re thinking about becoming one you will benefit greatly by gaining experience before you start getting your teaching qualifications. You can do this by contacting schools or classroom aide schemes, where you will get to experience teaching as an aide alongside qualified, working teachers. This can be a great way for you to experience the education system from the perspective of teachers.

    While working in schools, as a volunteer or otherwise, is one way to gain experience in teaching, there is the second option of tutoring students privately. Tutoring can be a great way to put into practice your teaching skills, although the one-to-one style of it may not be a perfect representation of what teaching a classroom can be like.

    It is important that you try to experience education first-hand before you continue with your teacher training qualifications. Depending upon where you work and what other qualifications you have, learning to be a teacher can take anywhere from 1-3 years, which is a lot of time to spend doing something you may not be suited for. Experience can tell you whether or not the profession is right for you.

  • How to Get Girls More Engaged in STEM Subjects

    A big part in the efforts against gender inequality isn’t to do with getting people the same wage for the same job (although there is of course that too),  but is actually to do with getting girls more interested in careers where the earning potential is generally higher than other careers. In the case of STEM subjects – science, technology, engineering and mathematics’ studies – girls have for a long time been unengaged and uninterested in studying these subjects and pursuing them at higher levels.

    Before we can discuss how to get girls more interested in these subjects, to the point that entries into careers which require qualifications in them are more gender-equal, we first need to understand the dynamics involved in why girls react in the way they do. Most studies point towards a few different factors for why this is the case:

    • A lack of role models – Most famous people who’ve become famous due to scientific, pioneering work, have been male. The fact that, historically, scientific discovery has been so unequal in terms of gender is discouraging for many; it is a big part of how people form expectations of what they can achieve and what others expect from them.
    • Male dominated industry – Starting to work in an industry, for a company that is dominated by males, both in positions of authority and among their peers, is something that people can find intimidating. This principle works both ways; men working in female dominated industries often encounter a bit of a barrier between themselves and everyone else.
    • A lack of encouragement from authority figures – In the same way that a lack of role models influences women negatively in terms of their interest in STEM subjects, the principle behind this also influences those in authority figures, both consciously and subconsciously; the whole world overtly and subliminally reinforces stereotypes in everyone of us, and whether you consciously or subconsciously observe these stereotypes, they can impact the behaviour you encourage and discourage, and the lack of understanding of this principle among many authority figures can also be a factor in the uptake of STEM subjects.

    Once you understand what these mean regarding the international efforts by school boards to encourage girls to take on STEM subjects, it becomes clear that, in order to buck the trend, creating a positive view will require the teaching community and parents generally to enforce positive views on STEM. In practice, this will require teachers to make a conscious attempt to react positively to young girls’ interests in the sciences, and to try to maintain that positivity throughout their academic life.

    Implementing these changes could potentially be a problem. It can be difficult to change how an entire society functions, particularly when many people expect it to change overnight, but everything needs to start somewhere. It looks like the best place to start trying to get people and young girls in particular to change their views on STEM subjects is to make sure that teachers treat their students equally, regardless of their gender.

  • Merging Childcare Facilities and Schools

    An interesting new scheme has come out of Ontario, with the potential to spread across the nation and the world, which is to merge childcare facilities and schools together. This has been considered and agreed upon with the assumption that allowing the children some sense of continuity, during the switch from child-care to kindergarten, could help with their adjustment to their life in education. Already we’ve seen how places in the UK and USA are considering to adopt similar strategies.

    One of the principle reasons for why this new strategy is being undertaken is because of the massive increase in demand for childcare. As more and more families are having to make the decision at early periods in their child’s lives to return to work, the demand for childcare has of course increased.

    Having childcare facilities in schools is helpful for children’s development, but it is also useful for teachers too, because they will be able to rely upon close childcare for their own children. Many large businesses and corporations already provide these types of services for their staff, but this is the first time schools have effectively done the same thing.

  • Deciding Upon Where to go to University

    Deciding upon where to study for higher education is, for many young adults, the most important decision they’ve ever made. It is at the very least a stressful decision because of this, but in addition it is made difficult by the number of competing University rankings’ lists which are produced every year.

    University Rankings

    Looking at rankings can give you a false impression of which university is actually the best or among the best in the world. This is mainly because many of the organisations who produce these rankings use highly subjective data. The one considered to be the most objective is usually the Shanghai rankings, which, although more objective than others, is still skewed towards the success in hard sciences.

    Often times, it is better to look at other rankings, such as the rankings of student satisfaction, or employability, and then decide depending upon which aspect of your schooling you consider most important.