Teachers for Supply

Making school fun can give children a lifelong love of learning and so it is important to keep the children engaged and motivated.

Young children find it difficult to stay engaged as they sit still listening to a teacher talking so breaking up the lesson adds excitement and keeps them interested. A good structure is to explain the task, let the children have a go then bring them back at intervals to see how the lesson is progressing. Learning in new ways and doing new things can help young children pay attention to the lesson being taught.

Learning by playing games makes learning more fun so if it is possible to incorporate games in.to the lesson it will add instant engagement. Games do not require a lot of advanced preparation time or expense, as there are thousands of free educational games online for them to play and of course there are traditional board games that incorporate lots of mathematical learning.

Most young school children do not like to sit still for very long so plan lessons where they have to move around the classroom or even take the lesson outside. Teachers have used hands-on activities for a long time as a way to make lessons fun and engaging. So, look for opportunities for the children in the class to do more of this and have less passive learning experiences.

Ask anyone who is a teacher, and they will tell you that a teacher’s work is never done that is to say there is always something more that could be planned, marked or displayed so how can teachers whether full time, part time or supply avoid burn out and keep a good work life balance?

The key for many teachers is to work smarter not harder in other words try to avoid tasks that do not make a difference to the teaching and learning that goes on in the class. Marking is a good example of this. How many teachers spend hours on marking children’s work when the children are too young to read the comments or older children are not given the opportunity to act on the comments made. A simple system of marking only a selection of books in detail for one piece of work then on another occasion marking different pupils work in detail can save hours of the teacher’s time. Younger children’s work could be marked with them so that a dialogue can be had, and new targets set.

Assessments take up a lot of a teacher’s time and energy and although valuable to decide on future work should not be central to the teaching and learning that takes place in the classroom.

If you are soon to start working in a secondary school, then you may wonder how you are going to go about gaining the respect of the pupils. It may have been that you have previously worked in primary schools and teacher in secondary schools can be quite different. Pupils will often tend to me more of a challenge when they are older, and you need to ensure that you get the balance right from the off. You want to be approachable but also ensure that they know you have the authority.

This can be hard to do and you may find that you have to change your teaching style. It is usually better to go in stricter than you want and intend to be and then lighten up over the coming months and weeks. If you start off being too soft you may find it harder to get them to do what you are asking later on down the line. Some students may take advantage and see you as a bit of a pushover.

If you find that it is just one or two pupils that are causing your trouble, then you may wish to take them to one side and speak to them on their own about their behaviour.

If you are a teacher, you will already know that your time is very precious and if you can save time anywhere you should do.

It is common practice to spend a lot of your spare time in the evenings and weekends planning lessons and marking work. It is a good idea to try and reuse as much of your planning as possible to cut down on the time it takes in the future. Very often you will be teaching the same topics year after year so it is worth ensuring that you save your lesson plans in detail to enable you to reuse them when possible. It may be that you have to teach different year groups. This doesn’t mean your previous lesson plans couldn’t be used again just that they would have to be amended.

Make sure that you have a good lesson plan template that you can use time and time again. If you do not have one, you can often find great examples online or if you work with a teaching agency they may be able to give you one.

Another way your lesson plans can come in use is to share them with other teachers that work in your school or through teaching forums.

As a teacher it is important that you find different teaching methods that you can use for different pupils. Although this may make your job a little more complicated it can help immensely with individual children’s learning.

It is unfair for us to expect that all children learn at the same speed and level. Many children will excel in one area but then may struggle in another. It is important to refinish when your teaching method doesn’t suit a child and try and adapt it to ensure they are not missing our. It may be that they need more one on one attention, in which case you may be able to get a teaching assistant to sit with the child and help them along. If there are quite a large group of pupils that don’t seem to get it, it may be that you are going too fast or are using words they don’t already understand. Rather than getting frustrated try and take a step back and approach the subject matter in a totally different way. Visualising things can often help a lot so don’t forgot to draw or write things down to get the children to be able to see what you mean.