thoughts

At the most recent Maths Conference in London, I spent one session sitting at a table with three NQTs, and was asked by one of them what my “top tips” were for surviving their NQT year. For a bit of context, I’ve now been teaching for six years if you include my GTP year, which I do, as I was thrown in the deep end with my own classes and found that year very challenging. As a result, I found my NQT year relatively straightforward, as I wasn’t in the position that many new teachers are: suddenly having to take on sole responsibility for the classes in front of me.

It still baffles me a little bit that people would ask me for advice, as I still consider myself a fairly “new” teacher, but I did my best with a few bits of advice. There are far more comprehensive guides on the Internet – I’d recommend checking out TM4T’s NQT guide, which has some fantastic tips for time management. Furthermore, I found it much more useful talking to colleagues working in my school for advice on how they manage day-to-day teaching, as every setting is different, and every school will have different policies and procedures that need to be followed.

Regardless, I thought a small series of “Tips for NQTs” might be a good use of some of my SBPC posts, if only to remind myself of the fundamentals of my teaching practice before September. Today’s is probably my most important tip:

Establish good relationships and trust from the first lesson

Every teacher has a different way of managing their classroom and their own teaching and learning ethos. Personally, I find that the first few lessons with a class can make or break the rest of the year. I usually spend a bit of time during the first lesson running through rules and expectations, but don’t go overkill on this – remember that your pupils will be getting this in every first lesson for over a week. Don’t give pupils a huge list of rules and sanctions – cut down to a list of five to seven basics, or use the school’s behaviour policy. Most pupils want to behave themselves and achieve well, and provided that you’re consistent with your expectations and use of rewards and sanctions, they’ll get on board with this.

Something that’s far more important to me is the content of the first few lessons. Let’s not forget that lots of pupils, despite our best intentions, really don’t enjoy their maths lessons – however, the majority of the time, I think this is down to confidence and perception that maths is difficult and that they’ll never manage to achieve whatever their target is, whether that’s a C, an A*, or just surviving the year.

Many pupils pitch up to the first lesson with a new teacher with negative experiences of maths; they have already decided that they “don’t get it” and that they consequently won’t get it this year and that they’ll find maths boring. There’s a temptation to try to break this misconception from the start, but I haven’t found that this works for me. I’m not saying that this approach doesn’t work; in fact, one of my colleagues starts the year with a “Maths Magic” lesson with Year 7 based on solving equations, which works well for her, but every teacher is different.

Personally, I begin teaching with a topic that I know pupils will have some success with. This needs to be picked carefully – you don’t want to patronise pupils by teaching them something that’s way too easy, particularly with higher sets, but more importantly, you don’t want to start off with something so complicated that they get lost halfway through the lesson. 

Keep the first few lessons simple; there’s time to break out the card sorts and treasure hunts later on. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a bit of chalk and talk when you’re getting to know a new class, and it helps build expectations for independent work. If your first few tasks are fairly straightforward, this frees up your time to circulate, check work and start working out the dynamics of the group. 

One of the most important parts of my teaching is about establishing trust – pupils need to be convinced that they will achieve and understand maths in your classroom, but you can’t do that straight away. Save the difficult topics for later on; if they trust you as a teacher and have experienced success before, they’re more likely to buy into the idea that, even if they don’t get it now, they will do in the future. For the first couple of weeks, make sure they leave the classroom in a positive frame of mind, feeling like they’ve “got” the stuff you’ve been doing.