A few words of advice for History teacher trainees and their mentors

This is the time of year when a raft of new History teachers begin their professional journey, whether it be through PGCE, School Direct or some other means. It is an incredibly daunting experience, especially this year in the unusual circumstances we find ourselves in. I have really fond memories of my own PGCE at York University (above) from 2007/8, not least because I met my now wife on it. But there were tough times — I really did not enjoy my second placement school very much, and got ill with a nasty bout of tonsillitis that kept me out of action for a week all told. This post aims to set out a few bits and pieces of advice for both trainees and mentors to help make the training year a smooth one. Pleasingly, we’re due a York University trainee in our department at my current school this year so it’s a good time for me to be thinking about this.

1. TRAINEES — Learning how to manage a class is the most important thing to get right when you start teaching.

By this, I mean, don’t spend hours and hours planning nifty card sorts and other complex tasks. Instead, focus on doing simple activities so you can focus on developing your teacher voice and teacher presence. Textbooks are your friend here, as, hopefully, are existing departmental resources. That ability to feel confident in the classroom, that it’s the natural place for you to be, is so important to get right quickly. That is made harder if you’re juggling fifteen different sheets to hand out, faffy group work tasks and overly complicated instructions. What you want are opportunities to ask the students questions that they can legitimately answer and develop a bit of rapport there.

2. MENTORS — Don’t expect too much, too soon.

I think there’s been a culture where trainees are expected to be off planning all their own lessons and developing their own resources straight off the bat. That, if a trainee has to rely on school-based resources, that this is a badge of weakness. I strongly disagree. Trainees need the support of the expertly produced materials from within your department and need to develop the experience of delivering those. They need to focus on learning the content, always a unique challenge for History teachers, which they often haven’t covered on their degree course. Let’s set up our trainees for success, especially early, by giving them some ready made resources to work with. Only when they’ve got that confidence do we want to start them, very slowly, with using their own produced resources.

3. TRAINEES — Subject knowledge matters.

The big challenge for new History teachers is that there is a huge amount of content to learn. Chances are you haven’t covered all of the following classic Key Stage 3 content in your degree:

• The Norman Conquest.
• Medieval monarchs.
• Tudor England
• The Civil War
• The Industrial Revolution
• The First and Second World War
• The Holocaust
• The Cold War

Of course, we’re now in an age of significant curriculum development, so there’s every possibility trainees are going to encounter an even greater range of topics than when I was training. It’s really important, therefore, as a trainee, to be happy diving into some GCSE and A-level textbooks to begin the process of upgrading that subject knowledge. Michael Fordham has an awesome list of good academic books for History teachers here and I recommend diving into one or two of these as well, especially if you’ve got some A-level opportunities on your timetable.

4. MENTORS — Give trainees a varied timetable

It’s really important, when devising a trainee’s timetable, to ensure they get as varied an experience as possible. Make sure that they have the opportunity to work with as many teachers in your department as possible. See if you can get them into some Geography or RE to enable them to talk about that in the event they need to apply for a ‘Humanities teacher’ role rather than a History-specific one. Make sure that they have the chance to observe some GCSE and A-level teaching, and by second placement, they ought to have the chance to have a crack at doing some short bits of teaching for those groups. Using them for intervention sessions is a nice creative way of getting them involved in teaching those pupils without feeling as though as you’re risking your own results too much (but barring disasters you want to get them delivering at least a small number of live lessons with GCSE groups especially). It’s also “juvenating” for your team members to feel involved with a trainee rather than just being sat in the Mentor’s classroom the whole time. I think it’s really important for trainees to see different teachers in action, to give them as wide an experience as possible to learn from and help them cherry pick bits to craft into their own style.

5. TRAINEES — Make the most of observing other teachers

One of the big weaknesses I see from trainees is that they don’t know how to use lesson observation to their own benefit. I think this is often because they don’t know what to look for. I think you want to look for very granular things. For example:

• How does the teacher get the class in and sat down?
• How does the teacher get the learning started? Do they use lesson recaps and retrieval practice or other methods? What variation is there between different teachers?
• How does the teacher transition from one activity to another?
• How does the teacher try to involve as many students as possible in the lesson?
• What verbal and non-verbal cues does the teacher use to ensure all students are behaving in the most appropriate way? How does the teacher use their voice, especially the tone of their voice? Literally, how do they stand and use eye contact with students?
• What’s the balance of teacher talk vs student talk vs student independent practice? How does this vary from lesson to lesson?
• What do you notice about how the behaviour policy is implemented by teachers?
• Are there any ‘go-to’ questions or activities individual teachers like to use more than others?
• How do teachers ensure silent work when they ask for it?
• How do teachers wind up the lesson? Do they use a plenary? Do they not?

I strongly recommend seeing if you can acquire a copy of Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion here. Once you get past the Americanisms, it’s a really awesome exploration of the minutiae of what effective teachers do on a day to day basis in class, with loads of great tips for getting more learning ‘bang for your buck’ without huge time investment. Use that to help you spot what teachers you are observing are doing that are effective practices.

6. MENTORS — The teacher standards fundamentally suck as a mechanism for developing new teachers, trust your instincts here.

Far too many lesson observation forms are divided up into sections linked to the Teacher Standards. I hate this. They are not a good way to assess the quality of teaching. One of the things I like about York University’s programme is the way that, as I recall, their observation form focuses on key features of good teaching without really shoehorning them into the Teacher Standards too much. This means you’re going to talk about what really matters in the classroom. Obviously it’s important to support the trainee with evidencing their progress towards the standards, but that should all come through incidentally from good lesson feedback discussions with trainees, rather than being an artificial focus. I’ve just bought a copy of Paul Bambrick-Santoyo’s Get Better Faster and his approach is to develop trainee practice over a series of very particular small steps, and if a trainee falls down in one of those in the sequence, then you focus on that, and that alone in the feedback. I’m explaining it badly as I’ve only really just dipped my toe into it but this blog by Adam Boxer explains it a lot better and is highly recommended.

7. TRAINEES — Look after yourself and carve out some ‘me-time’.

This sounds very trite and there’s no doubt the training year can be very intense. I think you have to make some time for yourself in the weekly calendar. For me, it was Friday after school and Saturday. As much as possible I would keep those clear of work. I’m not saying that was perfect because it made Sundays feel a bit sucky at times, but it definitely helped that I had at least 36 hours of work-free time. More recently, I’ve done things like have a regular five-a-side football game on a Wednesday evening, I’ve done a cooking class for a few weeks, I’ve had a night where both my wife and I (she’s also a teacher) have cleared out the schedule where we can just veg and watch telly, all sorts of things to try and ensure that the grind of work is interrupted. Teaching is one of those jobs where you can just fill any empty time with work, and you want to try not to do that if possible.

8. MENTORS — Carve out protected time for your trainee.

I think trainees really value reliability and consistency from a mentor. That when a meeting is scheduled, the meeting happens. That feedback on lessons is timely and prompt. That you have some availability to support them. They know busy teachers are but they do want and need some investment. It’s frustrating that some schools take on trainees without providing time for them. This is going to be even trickier in the current context with time in school even more precious as staff get kicked out of the building earlier for cleaning and have to traipse round the building. As trainees ourselves we benefitted hugely from the support we received (in most cases), and we need to give that back to trainees.

That’s enough from me for now. Definitely looking forward to hopefully mentoring again this year and supporting the development of new professionals, especially at this most tricky of times. It’s one of my most favourite parts of the job.