We’re into September now and that means lots of you will have started your teacher training year! Hopefully you’re starting to delve into some of the planning pages of our Teacher Training planner, so we wanted to take a moment to give you lots of real examples of how you can use this planner to really help with your learning and planning while you train to teach. Blog writer Harriet is sharing a sneak peak into some of her real notes from when she was training to teach, so you can see how a trainee teacher uses the planner pages to learn how to teach and to stay organised during a PGCE or SCITT year.
Step 1: Plan your year
Your training provider should hopefully provide you with a calendar, or a list of dates, so you can see exactly what is happening and when throughout your training year. We’ve put all this information into the year planner page in our teacher training planner and colour coded it so you can really clearly see what’s happening. There’s a different colour highlighter for university studies and three different placements. We’ve also circled important dates – this is when university essays are due. This is a great way to stay on track and plan out your time when you’re balancing university work as well as school teaching work! In February and May you can see there are university deadlines during a school placement, so we’ll have to keep in mind that we need to balance the two at the same time.
Prep: The Teacher Standards
The Teacher Standards are a set of 8 areas in which teachers and trainee teachers are assessed, to make sure they have all the right skills and knowledge to become a great teacher. You’ll be assessed against these standards throughout your training, and you’ll need to provide evidence of how you are meeting all of them, so it’s key you get to grips with them and understand them all. This can be a bit intimidating at the start of your course as it’s a lot of information! To help you out, we’ve printed the teacher standards into our planner, so for each one you’ve got an information page and a notes page. We recommend, at the beginning of your course, reading through each standard really closely, highlighting and making notes on your ideas and interpretations. This will give you a great start, and you’ll always be able to refer back to them and add to your notes during your training.
Make Those Teacher Standards Your Own!
You’ve read through the information pages on the teacher standards so you can understand them – now it’s time to put your own spin on it! During your training, you’ll need to provide evidence that you are meeting each standard. There are lots of suggestions for what you can use for evidence, like lesson observations, plans, and photos of displays, but exactly what this will look like for you will be unique and based on your specific teaching journey. We’ve split the notes page up and used the left side for ideas on how to translate the teacher standards into real evidence – what can I look for? We’ve added ideas on things we can do to show we’re meeting that standard, like building word banks, incorporating peer assessment into maths, and using a purple pen for editing in literacy. The right hand side is a tick list of specific evidence you’re going to upload; this shows which SPECIFIC display we want to take a photo of, and which specific child’s piece of work we need to photocopy or scan in to use as evidence. Then we’ve just drawn in a checkbox so we can tick off when we’ve actually uploaded that specific piece of evidence. This then also works as a quick list of everything that's in our evidence folders for each standard, so we know what we have and we can see where we might need to add more.
Use Those Observation Pages
Every training provider is different, and they’ll likely have a specific template they want you to use for when you are observing other teachers. However, I found during my training that I didn’t actually fill these out during the lesson; they had lots of specific boxes, and I just needed to get my head around what I’d observed. So it’s great to have a more informal place to write your observation notes that’s just for your own reference, then later you can use these notes to fill in the specific form you need to give your training provider. Our Teacher Training planner includes lots of observation pages, both for when you are being observed by others and for when you are observing lessons. Here’s an example of observing a Year 2 maths lesson. It’s really focused on helping you to learn from what you’ve seen, by asking what the impact was and what you want to take away. These pages are a great addition to your training and can really help you to think about what you want to include in any notes you give your training provider as evidence. You might just use these to fill in your university’s observation template, but you might also use these in your weekly reflection notes and pull out something you want to try yourself – make it a target! Training to teach is all about reflection, and these pages will help you to do that – and keep it all in one place!
Record, Record, Record
There are always lots of things to keep track of, whether that’s your own work as you train to teach, or whether it’s information to do with the students you’re working with. We’ve provided lots of blank records pages in the Teacher Training planner to help you to just that! There are lots of things you can do with them, and you can use them however you like – feel free to divide up the pages if you need to. You could use the top part of a records page for a habit tracker to keep an eye on your own wellbeing and work-life balance during your training. In our example page here, most of this page is devoted to keeping track of which children have done individual reading with the teacher each week. Your school might have a goal of reading with every child each week, or certain children, so having a records page is a great way to keep track of this. We’ve also highlighted just the first column and we’re using that to keep track of who has and hasn’t received star of the week! It’s one of those little bits on information you need to know so it’s great to just squeeze onto a page you’ll be using regularly anyway.
We hope this guide has given you some ideas for how you can use your Teacher Training planner while you study to become a teacher - good luck to you all and have a great year! You can find our Teacher Training planners here.
