Teacher Training Day 3

There are five teacher training days organised by the Schools Direct training provider between June and the end of July. I can only attend the first three because I’m otherwise engaged during the week of training days number four and five. So this’ll be last post about the training days. Onwards:

The focus of training day THREE was twofold: the first was to go over safeguarding, and the second was to focus on the element of whacky-ness in our lessons.

The safeguarding bit took up all morning; we had a safeguarding specialist in to go over with us what the different types of abuse were, signs, symptoms, procedures, titles of key safeguarding staff and so forth. I’d done a bit of safeguarding before in my current role as general wanderer around a primary school and the others in the room had experience in their various roles as teaching assistants, cub scout leaders, nurses and so forth, so I don’t think anyone was hearing any new stuff. I think they needed to ensure they got it covered with us so they were guaranteed everyone was 100% aware and knew what to do in the event of anything happening, which is perfectly acceptable and so I have nothing derogatory to say upon this part of the day. Except that people in the room were salivating for their chance to tell everyone the horror stories they’d had firsthand experience of. Still, it was a sobering lesson. We had to draw pictures of kids and write down what we thought the signs of the different sorts of abuse were and everything can be an indicator of abuse, everything. Poor academic slide, good academic lift, attention seeking, withdrawn behaviour, hating people, liking people. It was a good lesson in the sense that you have to really vigilant to catch this shit and, anything you do spot, no matter how minor, should be recorded in some sort of safeguarding manual. Take note.

So, the second fold of my twofold summary is the whackyness of the lessons. We had a couple of trainers from the last year come to take us through their outstanding lesson plans, both of which were built around the idea of unusual and unique structures. They emphasised the need to take risks as a trainee teacher. Anything that you think is too experimental, too chancy, too open to the kids going mental, you should do. It inspires and encourages the kids towards learning, it draws them to you and helps manage behaviour. Most of all, it enables them to remember the lessons learned more effectively. Happy days.  The trainers were like, take the kids outside, build things in the classroom, use videos, play music, do maths with food, do science with coke (ca cola) and so forth; don’t have the kids in rows copying out of text books, don’t have them reading out of books, mix it up, literally.

Out of the box and irreverent lessons also help build your teacher personality; it’ll help the kids see you as someone fun but clever, assertive but accessible, not like the teachers of yore. That’s what they kept going on about: don’t try and be teachers of the 80’s and 90’s. Move on, they’re dead, sometimes literally. A new age of teaching styles is sweeping the land and it’s based on taking risks in the classrooms. I don’t know what type of teacher I’m going to be; in that training room, there’s people who are obviously going to be the really cool teachers, then there’s ones who are already kooky and will fly with all this whacky lesson stuff, there’s people who can silence you with a cold stare. I don’t know what category I fit into. I suppose I won’t know until I’m in the classroom.

SCHOOLS DIRECT 15