Reflections On The Second Term Of An ITT Trainee - By Alan Miscampbell
During my time in teacher training, I’ve really enjoyed meeting others going through different training pathways with varying schedules for timetable progression targets and school placements, including at IMA Scholarship events. At my SCITT, trainees spend the entire year in a main placement school, except for a short six week second placement in January and February. Therefore, on the last day before the Christmas break, I said my goodbyes to trainees from other training providers based at my main placement school, knowing that they were due to leave before I returned.
The first week in my second placement school was quite calm, mostly spent observing lessons to get familiar with the classes that I would be teaching from the following week. The second week was rather challenging, not because of the planning workload, but because by the end of the first week I had been invited to two job interviews that I suddenly had to prepare for!
The contrast between my two placements meant that I had to swiftly adapt to different timetables and systems, especially the switch from teaching seventy-five to sixty minute lessons. Arguably the biggest challenge I faced during my short second placement was that I did not have enough time to learn the names of most of the students I was teaching. As I was not always provided with a seating plan to identify students, I ended up relying on gesturing to address pupils far more often than I would have liked!
As most ITT programmes move on to a second placement for the second half of the year, returning to a main placement is an experience that most trainees will not have. As this is the first year that my main placement school has taken trainees from my SCITT, pupils there have never known a trainee to reappear during the same academic year! Several were therefore surprised to see me and, while I had anticipated being given an entirely new timetable, I found myself teaching many of the same students as before. It was tricky to get back into the swing of leading classes that I had previously taught; I had to quickly liaise with different teachers about where classes were in schemes of work and start planning to teach lessons from the second day, a challenge exacerbated by teaching students who knew me and expected me to immediately know what I was doing!
I’ve subsequently managed to work up to an 80% timetable whilst continuing to work on feedback from my mentor and other teachers. I have frequent open discussions with my mentor during which we continue to set helpful well-defined achievable targets for my development. I’m looking forward to my remaining weeks in training before moving on to start my ECT job.
Sometimes teaching is still a challenge and lessons don’t always go to plan, but it’s worth bearing in mind that you could be having a huge positive impact on some students and not realising it. I was reminded of this as I was finishing my final tasks after school before heading home for the Easter break. I was walking between classrooms when I encountered one of my quieter year 7 pupils, accompanied by a friend I didn’t know. The friend asked if I was the cover teacher for another on maternity leave, but before I could reply, my student did; “No, he’s my maths teacher. He’s great!”
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