Often as a supply teacher you are called into a school that morning to start teaching the lesson at the start of the school day. Often the teacher will have left a lesson plan for you to follow or another teacher at the school will have drafted one for you that morning. As a supply teacher this can be very challenging, coming into a school where you don’t know the children and trying to follow plans, of varying degrees of detail, to produce an effect lesson for all the students.
The first thing to do when you arrive in the classroom is to familiarise yourself with the lesson plan and where things are in the classroom, this is much easier if you have a TA (teaching assistant) on hand to help out. If there are any bits of the lesson plan that don’t make sense to you then you could ask the TA or another teacher or work around it using your own ideas if needs be.
It’s always good practise to take along your own lesson plan as well so that you are prepared if the children complete their tasks quicker than expected or if the lesson plan isn’t working.
