Sally, our Teaching School Director, talks about her own experience of teacher training


To be or not to be a mentor… 

I am not sure if there is any more important time in a teaching 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 devoted to her planning and resources and feel a little red-faced and ashamed if I have cut corners she would not have cut. The ‘Paddington stare’ she used to keep her classes in line has often been emulated in my own classes. Who needs a raised voice, when a look can say it all? Little did I realise that the games we played with our respective classes shouting German responses backwards and forwards was not going to be repeated in any other school, but I thank my mentor for making me realise that teaching sometimes just needs to be fun! 

That joy of teaching well and teaching with passion has stayed with me throughout my career and I got that from my mentor. Because I was trained well, in a school that supported me, with staff who cared and students who were encouraged to enjoy learning, I knew from day one how good teaching could feel. Even when working in more challenging environments, I have kept with me a strong baseline of comparison as to how it could and should be. Those formative experiences have driven me to seek out that joy of teaching and learning or create it wherever possible. 

What a good mentor gives a trainee can be invaluable. I will forever be grateful for the patient way my mentor guided me through those first lesson plans, (when I clearly did not get it!). She taught me how to meet my classes with kindness and care whilst always demanding the very best that they could give. She helped establish my teacher persona, picked me up when I ‘fell’ and pushed me to be the teacher she believed I could be. My mentor started me on a journey which has brought me an immense amount of satisfaction and frustration and she showed me in those first few terms how to deal with both and keep going. 

The role of mentor is incredibly important and we are lucky to work with some amazing mentors in our schools. So here is to the mentors; for supporting, guiding and inspiring our next generation of classroom experts. One day they will look back and realise just how influential their mentor was when they took their first stumbling steps into this amazing profession. 

Sally Barfoot, Redhill Teaching School Director

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