Hello, my name is The NQT: how to survive your first term as a 'real' teacher

As you might be able to tell from the fact that this is my first blog since those sunkissed, lazy days of the summer holidays, being an NQT has come as quite a shock to the system. Losing the amazing support provided on the York PGCE and its partnership schools made me realised just how much I had taken for granted. Nothing prepared me for losing my evenings, my weekends, my half term – basically all of my free time – in the quest to simply find my feet as a ‘real’ teacher. Now, nearing the Christmas break, I have time (and feel able) to reflect on the challenges of my first (almost) term as an NQT – and to share what I have learned here. For trainee teachers: a warning from the future. For more experienced teachers: a quiet plea for your understanding, as we attempt to fathom the intricacies of SIMS, the school’s communications policy, the difficulties of being a form tutor, and all the other admin that was handled by our mentors and our placement schools during our training. For everyone who is not a teacher: one more voice explaining just how bloody difficult this profession is. But finally, for everyone who reads this: why I still think teaching is the best job in the world.

Challenges and advice

Firstly, I want to outline some of the biggest challenges I have faced, and how I’ve overcome them. I hope this will prove useful to NQTs of the future, as I can’t count how many times I have wished someone had told me about these things!

1. Problem: My work/life balance was approximately 90% work, 10% life. This became absolutely unbearable near the end of the first half term. It is SO important to ensure you are eating and sleeping well, as well as taking time away from teaching or thinking about teaching, to ensure you don’t go totally insane and burn out. That isn’t good for you, or your pupils, in the long run.

How I have dealt with it: I am fortunate to have a mentor who places a huge amount of focus on getting a good work/life balance and is fairly dictatorial about making sure I don’t stay too late at school every day of the week. The best thing that she helped me to do was to re-do my timetable by scheduling activities such as marking and planning into my frees. As long as I stick to this schedule, I can leave school at 5.30 most days, and have almost all of the weekend free.

My advice: 

• Don’t run around after pupils if you are providing help outside of lessons. Schedule a set time each week or fortnight to see groups of pupils (for example, I see the Oxbridge candidates I am coaching for an hour on Mondays and an hour after school on Thursdays). This streamlines extra demands on your time. 
• This also applies to detentions – make a set time that you will hold detentions, and get all the pupils to do their detention in this slot.
• Schedule activities for your free periods and stick to it.

How my life felt before I got my work/life balance under control!

2. Problem: Linked to this, I found I was unable to plan exciting, inventive lessons because of a simple lack of time. I became extremely frustrated and felt as if I had taken a large step backwards in terms of my pedagogy.

How I've dealt with it: I used the departmental resources and adapted the lesson plans in order to make them my own, which greatly reduced time I would have to spend on making resources like worksheets/card sorts etc. It is also a matter of practice makes perfect – I have definitely sped up my planning just because it is now part of my job every day. Additionally, I have stayed in touch with the people from my PGCE and we share resources using www.dropbox.com, as well as maintaining the Facebook group we used during the PGCE.

My advice: 

• Stay in touch with your fellow trainees – 11 brains are better than one!
• Take as much as you can from your placement schools in terms of resources (make sure to give some back, though!) – you never know when those lessons will come in handy.
•  Adapt as much as you can from resources you already have from your PGCE, the department you work in, and any resources from past schools you’ve been in – it’s impossible to create a new lesson plan for every single lesson from scratch.
• TES Resources will become your best friend – but ensure that you post some of your resources on there too, for good karma!

3. Problem: The volume of emails and in-house communication became overwhelming. This caused feelings of stress and panic every time I would receive a new email and have to ‘action’ it – I was unused to this scale of communication, so felt that everything was urgent!

How I've dealt with it: With my mentor, I took the decision to check my emails once before school and once after school. I have also become better at filtering for what is urgent, what is important, and what can be left for an after-school slot to ‘action’.

My advice: 

• Do not check emails throughout the day – check once before school and once after school.
• Arrange a system for ‘filing’ communications into urgent, important, and non-crucial. Deal with them in that order once you have free time, perhaps every day after school.

4. Problem: Ideological differences between the school I trained in and my new school posed one of the most significant challenges . I had trained in a school and on a PGCE which had a highly collaborative group-work focus, and my new school did not seem to embrace this approach. Setting out all Humanities classrooms in rows, with all pupils facing the front, instead of in table groups, is a good example of this. I found it extremely hard to plan for this classroom layout and felt as if I didn’t fit into the school’s ethos.

How I've dealt with it: I immediately started to negotiate with my department to let me change the classroom layout into tables, and it was agreed that I would wait it out for a half term and see if I got used to the rows. I didn’t, and after the October break I changed the classroom into tables. I now feel like my classroom is more my own, and I am able to use many more of the teaching and learning strategies I was trained to use. However, by keeping my head down and giving it a go for the first half term, I was able to see some of the benefits of seating classes in rows (especially for behaviour), and have used some of these in my behaviour management strategies, especially the importance of always looking at the teacher when they are talking.

My advice:

• Keep your head down for the first half term and try not to rock the boat. You will come into the school bursting with creative pedagogical knowledge. There will be plenty of time to share this after you have settled in.
• Negotiate politely and professionally if you wish to make a change. Compromise will be necessary.
• Trust your training and your knowledge – do not be afraid to challenge the status quo (politely!)    

The positives!

Although the issues outlined above have been very challenging, there are more than enough positives every single day to make me thankful that I am a teacher for a living. The rest of this post will reflect on these – because whilst NQT year has given me a bit of a shock, I still leave school every day with a smile on my face.

The best part of being a ‘real’ teacher has to be the feeling of owning your own class. Being alone in that room, with power to inspire, challenge and stimulate the minds of my pupils, is why I became a teacher in the first place and never ceases to give me huge amounts of job satisfaction. A moment where I realised that I truly owned my classes was when I read through the half-term homework I had set to my Year 7 class, which involved reflecting on their experiences of History at secondary school so far. In the vast majority of comments, not just the subject content and activities were mentioned, but they had specifically mentioned my presence, enthusiasm and personality as well (even if an alarming proportion had said ‘Ms Horton is slightly crazy/mad/mental’…)

Being a form tutor, and the pastoral side of my job, is also something I am really enjoying, although having responsibility for the behaviour, attendance and achievement of my form group on a school-wide level is certainly intense.

I have taken on two extra roles within the school involving sixth form. I am tutoring two Oxbridge candidates through the application and interview process and have planned a term’s worth of weekly sessions for them, focusing on the philosophy of history, interview preparation and preparation for the written tests. More formally, I am an Extended Project Qualification supervisor, which entails meeting with the students who’ve opted to do the EPQ and coaching them through the process of creating and writing their independent enquiry or orchestrating their project. I am currently supervising a student organising a fashion show for charity and two essay-writing students – one writing on aspects of the American justice system and one on the sustainability of hydrogen fuel. All of this is exciting and engaging on an intellectual level for me.

I’ve also been successful at teaching Geography for almost half of my timetable – the pupils are making good progress and I have established a positive relationship with all my Geography classes. This has shown me that I really am ‘a teacher of children’, not just ‘a teacher of History’ – and has given me great confidence in my flexibility and general pedagogical skills.

Final thoughts

All of this has served to prove that teaching truly is one of the most exciting jobs there is – where no day is ever the same, and you never get bored! The challenges can be overcome with hard work and tenacity, and the positives are 100% worth the grind. The gap between PGCE (or any other form of training) and your NQT year is enormous, and can seem overwhelming. Despite this, I remain convinced that I am lucky to be a teacher, every single day.