Being the ‘authority’ in the classroom
In my NQT year, I worked in an all-girls selective school in Birmingham. It was an exceptional school (grammar school caveats aside), and an incredible place in which to teach, and to learn how to teach in particular. My Head of Department, Julie, is a fantastic teacher. I imagine her style of teaching is much more en vogue now than it was back in 2008, what with her emphasis on the importance of subject knowledge and regular knowledge testing which went against the grain of the teaching fads of that period when we’re all trying to do our Marketplace tasks and get kids moving around the room.
Julie was a brilliant mentor, who’s advice and shaped the teacher and leader I have become hugely. She provided some excellent initial advice about the importance of the teacher having excellent subject knowledge. Maybe this was or is particularly true of History teachers, but I figure it’s probably applicable across lots of subject areas in secondary education. She was adamant that it was vital for the teacher to be in command of the subject, and the specification and assessment framework. This was crucial to ensure that the students had confidence in you.
The teacher with the weaker knowledge, she argued, would be the ones who would create anxiety for these students. The students would lack confidence in their teacher’s ability to guide them through all-important GCSE and A level qualifications with high grades. This crisis of confidence would probably spill back to parents, and we all know if we’ve worked in schools for a while that some of the most challenging situations with parents are where those of the highest attaining students with the most middle class backgrounds get involved and start making complaints.
On the other hand, the teacher in command of these things would provide reassurance for the students. Trust would be built and the teacher-student would relationship would have the conditions to flourish from there. The students would feedback positively to parents (which is vital because these students are the ones most likely to actually discuss their school day with their parents!) Of course, the challenge is that this work is time consuming. As a time poor NQT, I remember spending a long time planning lessons and learning the content for topics on Russian history between 1881 and 1924 that I’d never studied at any level, ever, in my academic career, as well as A-level Government and Politics Paper 1 — another subject I’d never studied before (beyond just being interested in Politics). I relished the challenge, because I like to learn new stuff, and like to think that I rose to it, but it was not easy telling apart my Pobedonostsev’s from my Stolypin’s from my Witte’s. I’ve always made a point since then of knowing the specification bullet points inside and out, being on top of all the past papers and what questions had come up and when, how they’d ask questions about certain tricky topics, and so on, in addition to mastering the actual content of the courses I was teaching.
Due to my personal situation, I ended up leaving that school at the end of my NQT situation and moving north. Since then I’ve only ever worked in mixed comprehensive schools, but the advice provided has really stuck with me. In addition to the benefits highlighted above, I’ve found it’s also been helpful in terms of managing behaviour and building relationships with young people.
For example, I’ve found that being a teacher who’s willing to provide high levels of academic challenge in class, and being willing to divert from the curricular focus from time to time to branch off into other topics (such as the current Russia-Ukraine crisis), I’ve found that various students, not just the so-called ‘best and brightest’ that you might find in a school like my NQT one, have valued that approach. In mixed-attaining classes with students achieving the full range of grades, that ability to keep both the higher-attaining cohort happy with academically challenging lessons, and being able to indulge other enthusiastic, ‘pro-History’ students with good hinterland knowledge and the ability to be draw on my own wealth of knowledge, I’ve found that it can keep the critical mass of the class pointed in a positive direction and avoid awkward situations with parents for the overwhelming majority of the class.
In particular, it’s helped in navigating the challenges that can be posed by some higher attaining students who really like to test whether their teacher knows what they’re on about. I’m sure as new history teachers we’ve encountered those students, who were perhaps quite clever and a bit over-confident, who liked to show off what they knew in such a way as to make it clear they were testing whether you knew your stuff. And if you didn’t pass muster in that regard, you’d end up having a hard time with that student or class. Part of meeting that challenge is ensuring you have good knowledge in the first place, and the other part is not letting it fluster you when you genuinely don’t know the answer to a question, or have to check something in the book because you’re not 100% sure. That’s a normal situation, especially for the new A-level teacher, but it can easily leave us feeling flustered and a little defensive particularly if that moment has come at a bad time, for whatever reason.
I don’t pretend this works in all cases. Like all teachers I imagine, I have some harder to reach students who are more disaffected for whom my history nerdiness doesn’t really rub off well. All I’m saying is that this has helped me have a way in with some students who maybe, for whatever reason, some other staff have struggled with (I don’t want to go down the route here of ‘they behave for me’ — again, note that as I said a second ago there are still plenty of students out there who give me a headache who maybe don’t quite as much for some others!). In addition, I’ve observed some teachers from time to time who clearly weren’t quite on top of this knowledge, and it left them a bit exposed and vulnerable in the classroom, and inhibited their ability to get the class onside as a result.
To me, it’s all about being the ‘authority in the classroom’. That doesn’t just mean being the authority in terms of discipline. It doesn’t mean being the shouty one issuing sanctions every five minutes. Being the authority also applies, perhaps even more importantly, to being in command of the material and the assessment framework for the subject or course that the students are following.
I guess what I’m trying to say, particularly to budding early career teachers out there, is that spending time really mastering the content is time well spent both in the short and long term. It pays off in a number of different ways, not just in terms of making sure your A level lesson tomorrow is planned and that you can hold your own in that sense. It’s also your way in to ensuring more effective classroom management. Kids want to know you know what you’re on about — don’t be afraid or timid in showing them that you do!
