Lesson planning is the one the most exciting parts of being a trainee teacher. It might not like sound it but being given 60 whole minutes and the complete freedom to do whatever you want with it, is like being given a blank canvas and being told you can paint it however you like. The blank canvas being the hour-long lesson and your paints being the lightbulb moments that flash into your mind when you are driving home, are on a run, or in the shower. It can be tedious, draining, and time-consuming, but it can also be a creative outlet for you to express every element of your passion for a subject you love, so much that you want to dedicate your career to passing that love onto the young people who walk in and out of your classroom every day.   Sometimes, I get carried away planning lessons and have this wonderfully weird idea that I think is the best thing since sliced bread, that will make the most amazing, engaging lesson plan that even my hard to please, too cool for school year...

 

To be or not to be a mentor…   I am not sure if there is any more important time in a te aching career than those formative first years as a trainee and newly qualified teacher. It is in our early careers that we establish our identity as a teacher, develop our good (and bad) habits and begin to become the expert in the classroom. I still use some of the resources I made in my very first terms as a trainee. I may have adapted and refined them but essentially the skills I was learning then have stood me in good stead and helped me build a strong foundation for what has turned out to be a successful and rewarding 30-year career in education.   I was lucky. I had the huge good fortune to train with an amazing mentor who hugely influenced the teacher that I became. To this day I will stop and think about what my mentor would have done in certain situations or how she would have taught a certain grammar point. I still look back in admiration at the amount of time and energy she dev...

Hi everyone, this blog will focus on the role of the mentor within your school on the Redhill IL SCITT programme and how they play a large part of helping your development into teaching to find your voice, confidence and reflective ability.  If you haven’t seen my previous blog, I am currently a Geography trainee in suburban Leicester. My mentor, Tom, is Head of Geography at my school and to begin, he was the first person I met once through the automatic doors of the school foyer. This welcome set the tone, and his eagerness to have me within the class followed and for the first couple of weeks, I studied his mannerisms, behaviour management, relationship with the students and intonation closely. It was also in this time that my mentor and I figured each other out, seeing how best we could work together, how regularly I would receive feedback, when and where I could have a quick chat and who to turn to if he wasn’t available. These small things all helped me in my routine, but befo...