Becoming A Primary School Teacher PDF

Becoming a Primary School Teacher
This book is a survival guide if you are just beginning in primary school teaching.
Written with the needs and questions of the new student teacher in mind, it covers the
fundamental aspects of the job of the primary school teacher in an inspiring yet down-to-
earth way. Each chapter covers a key issue in primary education:
• Working with people
• Organising the classroom
• Planning the curriculum
• Managing behaviour
• Assessing and record keeping
• Thinking about education
• Becoming a professional
Becoming a Primary School Teacher is the perfect introductory text for the student
teacher, helping you to prepare for the beginning of your course. It will also be of interest
to more experienced teachers and teacher trainers.
Dominic Wyse worked as a primary school teacher and subject co-ordinator before
moving into teacher education. He is now a Principal Lecturer in Primary Education at
Liverpool John Moores University.
Becoming a Primary School
Teacher
Dominic Wyse
London and New York

First published 2002
by RoutledgeFalmer
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by RoutledgeFalmer
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.

“To purchase your own copy of this or any of
Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks
please go to www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
RoutledgeFalmer is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

© 2002 Dominic Wyse
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage
or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Wyse, Dominic, 1964—
Becoming a primary school teacher/Dominic Wyse.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-415-25471-X
1 Elementary school teaching—Great Britain. 2. Elementary
school teachers—Training of—Great Britain. I. Title
LB1776.4 G7 W97 2002
372.11′00941–dc2l 2001048948
ISBN 0-203-16715-5 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-26196-8 (Adobe e-Reader Format)

ISBN 0-415-25471-X (Print Edition)
Contents
List of figures vii

Acknowledgements ix
Introduction xi
1 Working with people 1
2 Organising the classroom 14
3 Planning the curriculum 21
4 Managing behaviour 34
5 Assessing and record keeping 45
6 Thinking about education 53
7 Becoming a professional 60
References 70
Further reading 71
Index 72
Figures
3.1 The recommended format for medium-term literacy planning 26
3.2 The recommended format for short-term literacy planning 27
3.3 An example of a lesson plan format 28/29
5.1 Record-keeping pro forma for assessment activity 49

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Jude Bowen for her inspirational idea and faith in my ability; Anna
Clarkson as editor of the project; Jude Exeley for her prompt and excellent assistance;
Ainé Sharkey for her incisive comments on early drafts; James Crossan and Denis Burns
for their response to the proposal; the first cohort of students on the Liverpool John
Moores University PGCE course.
This book is dedicated to my two ‘little monkeys’ Esther and Oliver, and most of all to
Jackie.
Introduction
Your decision to read this book shows that you are interested in primary teaching. You
may be about to start a teacher-training programme. You probably have the idea that
teaching is a fascinating and rewarding career—it certainly is. The very heart of what
primary teachers do is about giving children better opportunities for their future lives.
When you reach the end of this book you will begin to realise that the job of the
primary teacher is a complex one. However, there are some basic aspects that have never
changed: groups of children; teachers; things to be taught and learned; classrooms (or
other learning locations); and resources to support teaching. When you think about
teaching in this way it is straightforward.
Whether you regard teaching as complex or straightforward it is a job that at its best is
thrilling. A common observation by teachers is that, unlike other jobs they have done,
they can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times they have been ‘clock-
watching’ out of boredom. The immense satisfaction of doing a job that contributes so
significantly to the needs of society has inspired millions of teachers since time began.
If you have already been accepted on to a teacher training programme then this book
will give you an overview of the main aspects of the job, and enable you to be better
prepared for the further work you will do on the programme. You may be encouraged to
read sections of this book as part of your pre-course preparation. If you are already on a
programme then this book is a succinct reminder of the key issues.
There are a range of books (some of which you will see recommended in the further
reading section) that address the general aspects of primary teaching. These books are
typically much longer than this one, and explore the primary school teacher’s role at a
higher level and in more depth. Often these books are better for dipping into once you
have an overall grasp of the role. I hope that the length and style of my book might
encourage you to read it in one sitting and motivate you to explore the ideas in many
other texts as well.
To give a brief flavour of what has excited me in my teaching career I offer a few
anecdotes. While at college I had taken a real interest in the teaching of language and
literacy. This was very useful in my first teaching job in a deprived area of London. Each
term of the probationary (what is now called induction) year we were observed by a local
inspector. The inspector was very complimentary about what I was doing in the
classroom—it is always nice to receive positive feedback! Nevertheless, I was a little
disappointed that some of the children did not seem to enjoy their writing. One of the
advisory teachers in the education authority recommended a book about the teaching of
writing. When I tried this approach there was a transformation in the children’s attitudes.
Children who a few weeks before had been saying ‘Oh no, not writing again’ were now
saying ‘When can we do writing workshop?’
Taking children out on visits is often a wonderful experience. Some years later,
working in a large first school (ages 3 to 8) where 99 per cent of the children were British
Asian, I organised a day trip which fitted with our topic of ‘transport’. The day was to
include a bus ride, a walk in the country, a canal boat trip and a train journey. Some of
the children had never even experienced a trip into the city centre, let alone ventured out
into the suburbs. The excitement the children showed about a trip which for adults would
be pretty mundane was fantastic. A sunny lunch-time picnic in my garden which was en
route added to the warmth of feeling we all felt about the day.
A trip with another class in my next school was to Caphouse Colliery which is now
the West Yorkshire Mining Museum. The ex-miners who showed us around were great
with the children. The highlight of the trip was a descent into the mine shaft. A week or
so after the trip the person responsible for the museum wrote to the class saying that in all
her years of working there, she had never had the pleasure of working with such an
enthusiastic and motivated class of children.
As I said at the beginning of this introduction the main focus of your job is the
children. A final anecdote is about the satisfaction I felt in helping one child to succeed.
Regrettably Hayley (all names in the book are fictional) had been written off as an
academically middle-of-the-road ‘drip’ by some of the teachers in the school. When she
joined my class she was certainly quiet and reserved. Once I had established the routines
of the classroom I began to offer the children quite a lot of choice about the activities
they carried out; for instance, how long they spent on them, the order they carried them
out and so on. Hayley took to this flexibility eagerly and showed that she had
considerable skills in independent working. I praised her for this and gradually her
confidence began to grow. She also enjoyed the freedom to make decisions about her
writing during writing workshop. At the final parents’ evening her mother (also a teacher)
was overjoyed at the progress her daughter had made. She said ‘I’m really grateful for
what you have done for Hayley. I wish I could achieve that with the children in my
class.’
These anecdotes give a flavour of some of the things that have stuck in my mind, but
there are many other more day-to-day features that make the job enjoyable: for example,
children who are so motivated by their work that it goes on both at home and at school;
the satisfaction of creating systems that really work well in the classroom; working
together on a dramatic performance; children’s faces rapt in the magic of a good story.
Most people remember one teacher from their school days who really made an impact
on them. Those special teachers do all of the things that follow in the rest of this book,
and more!
Chapter 1
Working with people
What are inter-personal skills? Why are they so important?
Inter-personal skills are social attributes that we use in

order to communicate with and relate well to people. It is
not that all people in the school should be close friends,
but teachers’ inter-personal skills need to be well
developed in order to form positive and productive
relationships. It has been said that ‘you can’t learn from
someone you don’t like’. This is perhaps a little extreme
but it illustrates how important the teacher-learner
relationship is.
Working with children
Your attitudes to children

The attitudes you hold about children and their learning are important because they have
an impact on the quality of your relationships. Some of the following ideas are not
unarguable facts, but they do reflect many teachers’ views on how to deal with children.
Children want to learn. From a very young age they are fascinated by the world
around them. I remember seeing a television programme which reinforced this belief. The
programme was called Baby Monthly. It looked at the experiences of different parents
over the first six months of their babies’ lives. The parents had access to various
researchers. One of the interesting general things that came from the researchers was that
they had moved away from theories that young babies couldn’t understand much, to
theories that they could understand a great deal. The researchers were still finding new
things that young children could do. One example was an experiment where a baby’s
dummy was linked to a computer. When the baby sucked on the dummy the screen image
changed. The six-day-old baby was able to keep sucking until the picture of its mother
was on screen and then stop sucking for several seconds to prevent the image from
changing into a different mother: at just six days old!
This early incredible appetite for learning continues when children start formal
education. Children are very enthusiastic to learn all the things that teachers and other
adults can teach them. This is something that is positive about children and should form
the basis of your opinion about their capabilities.
Becoming a primary school teacher 2
The difficulty comes when some children appear to show that they do not want to
learn. There may be many reasons for this: an uninteresting lesson; a subject they do not
particularly like; a problem in their lives; tiredness; other children stopping them working
and so on. One of the teacher’s jobs is to understand about the children in their class.
Sensitive teachers can sometimes pick up reasons why children may not be very
motivated on a particular day. Sometimes a child’s attitude to the work seems to be
negative over longer periods of time. The response of the teacher has to be (1) remind
yourself that children want to learn; (2) try and make the curriculum as interesting as
possible; (3) if there are problems try and find out what these are; (4) recognise that
changing some children’s behaviour can be a long process.
Much of what I have said in the previous paragraph is about being positive. All
people—and children are no exception—respond better to positive interaction. Some
teachers recommend ‘four positives to each negative’ which is a good rule of thumb.
There are many ways that you can show you are being positive. Simple phrases such as
‘that’s really good’, ‘well done’, ‘lovely work’ and positive body language such as
smiling are straightforward. At a more demanding level it is good if you can offer
specific positive feedback, for example, ‘I liked the way that you had a try at that
spelling’ or ‘Well done, you worked out that word by reading to the end of the sentence’.
The other important element about being positive is to do with the way you respond to
‘wrong’ answers or ‘misconceptions’. Remember that children want to learn, which
means that when they offer an answer to a question or a suggestion it is nearly always
meant seriously. You should never ridicule a child for an answer and always try to search
for the positive thinking and/or knowledge behind it. Even in a subject such as maths
which has ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ answers to computations, it is possible to value the
child’s thinking. First, a positive response from the teacher (A); second, an unhelpful one
(B):
Teacher A: What’s 6 doubled?

Child: 3.
Teacher A: Good try. 3 is half of 6, can you think what 6 is doubled?
Teacher B: What’s 6 doubled?
Child: 3.
Teacher B: No that’s wrong.
In the first example the child would have learned more, as would the other children in the
group, because the teacher used the opportunity to enhance the children’s knowledge by
talking about ‘half of 6’. The teacher also helped the child to understand the problem with
their answer in a sensitive way. In the second example the child may have felt slightly
‘stupid’ and would not have known why the answer was wrong. Another good strategy is
to ask the child how they arrived at an answer, which can give more opportunity to praise
logical thinking even if the final answer is incorrect. The point here is not to say that
teachers should never let children know when they are wrong but that this should be done
sensitively.
When you meet a group of children for the first time it is important to establish an
appropriate professional relationship. In a nutshell this is one that is firm but friendly. It
is firm because you need to make sure that the children do as they are asked, as you will
Working with people 3
see in Chapter 4 on managing behaviour. It is friendly because you form quite a close
relationship with your class over the year. You become a trusted adult whom they may
need to talk to in order to resolve their problems. You must be approachable so that those
children who are shy still feel able to talk to you.
As part of your friendly side you will sometimes come into physical contact with
children. Infant children sometimes welcome an arm around the shoulder and may want
to hold your hand at playtime or if out on a walking trip. The main point to remember is
to be sensitive to what the children need, both as individuals and as an age group. Men
sometimes find this more difficult than women but they should not be unduly worried by
physical contact provided they are sensitive to children’s needs. As you work with them
you will realise what physical support is necessary. As children get older their growing
confidence means that physical contact is rarely necessary.
Because children are small in size and developing as human beings there is a tendency
to patronise them; this should be resisted at all costs. They should be given the same
respect as adults. One way of achieving this is to try not to talk to them in a way that is
radically different to how you might talk to respected adults. Obviously there are
differences, mainly related to children’s understanding, but overall you should aim to
show them respect, empathise with them and be genuine with them. One of the enjoyable
differences however can be in their sense of humour which good teachers tap into. David
McKee’s picture book Who’s a Clever Baby Then? is a lovely example of slightly over-
the-top baby talk and its consequences.
Part of showing that you respect children is illustrated by how you talk about them
when they are not there. Occasionally, primary school staff rooms have people who talk
in inappropriate ways about children. Part of your professional awareness is to avoid this.
Perhaps one way to guard against being inappropriately negative is to imagine how a
child might feel if they could hear what was being said. A colleague once told me that she
had heard a teacher refer to a child as a ‘plank’. She asked the teacher whether he thought
this was appropriate. The teacher said that it was only a joke and the child had laughed.
The problem with this explanation is that children quickly develop the idea that it can be
in their best interests to laugh at teachers’ jokes—however poor they are. Consider how a
teacher would feel if a child called them a ‘plank’.
A less offensive example, although one which is important, is the use of the terms
‘bright’ or ‘not very bright’: ‘Sharon’s a bright girl’ or ‘Hmm, Ahmed, he’s not very
bright is he?’ The problem with terms like bright, clever, intelligent and their opposites is
that they may suggest that children’s achievement is fixed and there is nothing that can be
done. All learners develop at different rates at different times in their lives. Looking back
on my own learning I feel that I excelled at primary school, I was weak up to and
including my O levels, A levels were a little better, my first degree was average, my
Masters degree was much better, but it is only now at the age of 37 that I feel my learning
is most productive and of the highest standard. The idea of labelling children with terms
such as ‘bright’ is related to poor understanding of the nature of intelligence and can
become a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’: if teachers believe something about a child then there
is a danger that it might come true because of the teacher’s low expectations. However,
there are some problems with language here: ‘high attainment child’ and ‘low attainment
child’ are a bit of a mouthful even if they are more accurate. Perhaps it is better not to
generalise about children’s achievements but to talk about specific examples instead; for
example, ‘Ahmed worked really hard on some history work but I wish I could get him to
copy less’.
Getting to know your class

Even before you start teaching your class there are things that can be done to learn more
about the children. Reception classes usually encourage visits from nurseries so that the
children can get to know a little about their new class. This kind of work also happens
with older children when you talk to the previous teacher and read the children’s records.
Experienced teachers also have informal opportunities to meet the children who are going
to be in their class at various times throughout the school day, including lunch-times and
break-times.
One of the most basic things about forming a relationship is knowing someone’s
name. Learning the names of children whom you teach is a first step in developing a
relationship and teaching them better. Think about how irritating it is when people get
your name wrong. Some years ago a colleague of mine carried out an inspection of a
school. While he watched a lesson the teacher constantly referred to two boys as ‘Fred
and Bob’. Their real names were Asian. When the inspector asked the teacher about this
he replied ‘It’s just a bit of fun, they don’t mind.’ When the inspector asked the boys they
said ‘We don’t like it because they’re not our proper names.’ Some names are quite
difficult to pronounce at first but it is really important to ask the child how to pronounce
them correctly. Even large, impersonal media organisations make a lot of effort to ensure
that names of all kinds are accurately pronounced. For primary teachers who form such
close relationships with the children they teach it is essential.
One job that is carried out at the beginning of each morning and afternoon session can
help you to learn the names quickly: registration. The register is an important legal
document that must be completed by all teachers. In the first week with your new class it
is also a helpful way to get to know the children. As you call the names you look at each
child when they answer and this helps your memory. Teachers have adopted several
strategies for registration. Some prefer to read the register as follows:
T: Good morning Amy

Amy: Good morning Mr Wyse
T: Good morning Brian (etc.)
Some just call the names without the ‘Good morning’ and are happy with ‘Yes Sir’ or
‘Yes Miss’. Others encourage the children to call their names out in order (without the
teacher prompting them) and the teacher marks them as present or absent (there are also
various symbols for such categories as authorised or unauthorised absence, holidays,
medical reasons for absence, etc.). Some teachers have even supervised children as they
take their turn to call the register and make the marks in it. This can be a good reading
activity and allows the children to see the way the register book works. It also provides
the opportunity for some maths by adding up the figures. The registration of children in
nurseries and reception is often less formal. Nurseries tend to admit new children at
different times so that the staff can get to know them gradually. In the early years,
children’s names are a very important general tool to support their developing literacy
skills, and these are used in a wide variety of ways including matching games, labelling,
lists, etc.
In the first week with a new class it is useful to play some ice-breaking games. If the
children are new in school this can help with the learning of names and the getting-to-
know process. Even if the class have been together for some time it is often the case that
new children join the class at the beginning of a year. The games can also be a useful tool
for working on inter-personal relationships between the children.
Ice-breakers are often played by sitting in a circle in a comfortable area of the
classroom and are one example of ‘circle games’. One of the simplest is to say ‘my name
is…’ and then to throw a teddy bear to someone else in the circle who says ‘Thanks…my
name is…’. Other ice-breakers can involve walking round the room, finding out another
person’s name and some information, remembering it and then sharing it with someone
else: ‘I met…they told me that…’.
Apart from learning names, circle games have been used for a wide range of issues
and subjects. For example, there are musical games, such as tapping a rhythm on the back
of the person next to you, which they have to pass on to the next person. The circle can
also be a time for discussion about social and behavioural issues: ‘Give the day a score
out of 10’ or ‘Tell us one thing that was good about today’. Drama can involve activities
such as ‘hotseating’, a dramatic technique where the child takes on a certain role. The rest
of the class ask the child questions, and the child answers those questions as if he or she
were the character.
Although playground duty can be a chilly business in winter it is also a great
opportunity to get to know children more informally. Children often appear to be quite
different characters once they move from the classroom to the playground. Children who
are shy in class sometimes become leaders in the playground and vice versa. Infant
children in particular enjoy teachers who occasionally join in with some of their games
and this gives a further opportunity to get to know not only the children in your class but
other children in the school community, some of whom will join your class at a later date.
Trips out of school are one of the best ways to develop a relationship with the children
in your class. Trips that involve nights away from school are often fondly remembered
experiences for teachers and children alike. But even shorter day trips and walking tours
of the local environment can be an opportunity to informally chat to children whom you
feel you would like to know better.
Skills of interaction
Teachers’ ability to talk with children is one of their most important skills. This talking
requires the skills of several professionals rolled into one: an actor, a counsellor, a judge,
a police officer and so on. Acting skills are necessary to bring lessons alive, for example,
when reading stories and poetry. Like the police officer, good order has to be maintained
and rules need to be upheld. The skills of a judge are required when children make
complaints about other children.
Another important role of teachers is to counsel children if they have problems.
Professional counselling requires great skill and it is a job, like teaching, that one is
always learning to do better. Counsellors themselves have to be professionally counselled
throughout their careers as part of their lifelong learning. Clearly teachers will not
develop these skills to such a high level but there are some basic lessons to be learned.
One of the key counselling skills is the ability to really listen to what people say. This has
been succinctly summed up by the acronym REG: when you listen to children—and to
other people—you need to show them Respect, Empathy and Genuineness. Respect can
come from your positive attitude to children and the way you value their opinions. It can
also come through being attentive to what they are saying, for example, by maintaining
eye contact (be aware that some British Asian children and other ethnic minority groups
may have customs which encourage children to look down at times rather than
maintaining eye contact). Empathy is about really trying to understand how the child is
feeling and appreciating their point of view. As an adult it is all to easy to dismiss
children’s views just because they are immature. Genuineness is about being honest with
the child and answering their questions with as much truthful information as possible.
The main aim of your interaction during lessons is to take the children’s learning
forward. This will differ depending on whether you are working with the whole class, a
small group or an individual child. Whole class work tends to be more formal than small
group and individual interaction. Taking turns to talk is an important aspect of this
because when children talk over each other nobody can hear. Small group work can
benefit those children who lack the confidence to contribute much in the whole class
group. Individual interaction allows for true sharing of ideas and the opportunity to really
address a child’s needs.
One of the well-documented interaction skills is the ability to use questions to enhance
learning. First, a couple of general points. Questions teachers ask are different from
questions children are asked at home. Usually when someone asks a child a question at
home they do so for the genuine reason that they want to know the answer: ‘What do you
want to drink?’ ‘What happened at the party?’ When teachers ask questions they often
have the answer in their head with the intention of assessing understanding: ‘When did
the fire of London happen?’ It is useful to remember that at times you should ask
questions where you are genuinely interested in the child’s opinion in addition to your
more assessment-focused ones.
Some people believe that the main role of the teacher is to act as a facilitator. This
means that they prepare activities for children and then encourage the children to learn at
their own pace and through discovery. The teacher will interact with the children but
more to encourage the children to learn for themselves than to instruct them. Other
people think that the most important role of the teacher is to didactically instruct children;
in other words, to give them the knowledge they need. In recent years there has been
pressure from government to do more whole class teaching and for teachers to intervene
more and to instruct children more. However, teaching and learning is much more
complex than either of these positions and requires the teacher to use both styles
depending on the needs of the children at a particular time. It should also be remembered
that children can learn a tremendous amount on their own. It is the combination of
independent learning and supported learning that is the best way to help children.
Studies of interaction have found that typically, teachers spend 75 per cent of their
time talking and children only 25 per cent. If you divide that 25 per cent between a class
of thirty children that does not give much time for talk per child. This is why small group
and individual work is so important because it gives children much more opportunity to
talk and learn. Try to monitor approxi mately how much of the time you spend talking
and how much you encourage children to talk.
Another general question to think about is how long do you wait for a child to answer?
I remember reading about a researcher who was working with some children. He asked a
child a question and then let the child think about it. The child thought for about forty-
five seconds and then came up with an appropriate answer. Forty-five seconds may not
seem very long to you, but in a busy classroom you may find that children sometimes get
only about a second or two to answer. Try and give them as long as they need; if they
really do not know the answer they will tell you, or you might pick this up from their
body language.
A classic distinction is made between ‘closed’ questions and ‘open’ questions. A
closed question might be: ‘How do you spell “enough”?’ An open question might be:
‘What are your views about The Philosopher’s Stone?’ It is important that the kind of
question you ask helps you to address your aims for the teaching that you are doing.
Sometimes, too many closed questions can result in a rather narrow form of learning. At
other times they are an efficient and necessary way to assess the children.
Teaching and learning is not just about questions. Dialogue with children can be very
varied. For example, a statement (provocative or otherwise) can sometimes help spark a
discussion: ‘There’s no such thing as ghosts.’ Sometimes if you tell the children
something about yourself this can draw them into a conversation: ‘Last night I went to
see this football match. A friend of my wife had a spare ticket so even though I’m a
Leeds supporter I had to sit with Everton fans which was a bit strange when Leeds
scored. Leeds were all over Everton but it ended 2–2. Have you ever been to a football
match?’ These examples reiterate a point I made earlier about the importance of being as
natural as possible with the children. A friendly professional relationship gives children
the confidence to talk and learn.
To conclude this section on working with children it is important not to forget…err,
now what was it…oh yes, a sense of humour (as you can see, something I always struggle
with)! We all love to laugh and apparently it is good for our health. Humour can be a
powerful way of winning children over. It’s not that the classroom is like a ‘comedy
store’, because children can sometimes relax a little too much, but humour is excellent for
taking the tension out of situations. If a child is being uncooperative, one of your
strategies can be the use of humour. This reminds me of something that happened to a
student teacher. A child who had been naughty in a PE lesson had scaled a climbing
frame and was refusing to come down. The headteacher happened to walk through the
hall and could see that the student was struggling. The head went up to the child:
Head: Are you Spiderman?

Child: No [nervous giggling].
Head: I bet you can’t get down as quickly and as safely as you got up!
The child climbed down. Of course the natural authority of the head helped, but so did
the opening question which was designed to diffuse the situation.
Working with adults
Parents
I once saw a photograph that illustrated the old-fashioned approach to parents. In a school
playground a white line was painted at the entrance along with the words ‘Parents, do not
cross this line’. Children were seen as ‘empty vessels’ ready to be filled with knowledge,
and parents were seen as a potential hindrance to that process. Things are very different
these days: there is a recognition that parents know important things about their children
and can be partners in their child’s learning. Some people would argue that parents and
the home environment are the decisive factor in terms of learning.
It is important for you to develop positive relationships with everyone in the school
community. Parents have a special significance as part of this community and have a
wide range of influences on schools. Some are members of the school governors and
have responsibility—in partnership with the headteacher—for the smooth running of the
school. Teachers tend not to meet governors very often (unless they are a teacher
governor themselves) but they are important people in the life of a school. Governors are
mainly parents of children at the school who volunteer to work in their spare time to
support the work of the school. Their role is so important that they will influence the
recruitment of new teachers and, in unfortunate circumstances, may be involved in
making people redundant. Parents also get involved in social activities through the Parent
Teacher Associations (PTAs) which raise extra money for schools and develop links with
the community at large.
When children first come to school in the term of their fifth birthday, early years
teachers share information with parents and ask for their opinions about their child. The
early years teacher completes ‘baseline’ assessments which assess the child’s
achievements so far. However, school communication with parents can be rather one-
sided. For example, most parents’ evenings result in the teacher simply telling the parents
how their child is doing. It is much better if there can be dialogue on such occasions, with
teachers sometimes asking for parents’ opinions about their child’s learning and interests.
Some parents offer to support teachers as assistants in the classroom and they are a
vital resource. The recognition of the important role that parents and other helpers can
play in the classroom is illustrated by the inclusion of ‘other adult’ in the official
planning formats for the National Literacy and Numeracy strategies. Parents come into
schools offering a wide variety of skills. Some parents have an instinctive flair for
helping children learn and require the minimum of guidance. These people sometimes
train to become teachers themselves after encouragement from qualified teachers and
their headteachers. Other parents require more guidance from the teachers with whom
they work. Once you have qualified and have been teaching for a while you will have
built up some impressive skills that are not always obvious to the lay person and which
can be passed on to classroom assistants. Many parents admire teachers for the way they
work with thirty-plus children when they know how challenging it can be to bring up a
much smaller number of children in the home.
In addition to working closely with parents as classroom assistants you will have a
wider responsibility to communicate effectively with all the parents of the children in
your class. The formal occasion when this happens is at parents’ evenings. However,
throughout the year there will be occasions when you will talk to parents, often on a more
informal basis. On these occasions as I mentioned before, it is important that you
maintain the characteristics of a productive relationship, and be positive, friendly and
helpful. Speaking as someone who has been both on the inside of the school system as a
teacher then lecturer, and on the outside as a parent, I can tell you that the two sides are
very different. The main difference is how little you know, as a parent, about what
happens to your child at school, so it is always useful to be given information as part of
informal discussions.
It is important to remember that parents know their own children better than anyone
else; however, this knowledge is different and complementary to that of the teacher. One
feature of this is in relation to the child’s behaviour. Sometimes children who are well
behaved at school can be more difficult at home. The closeness of the home relationship
means that children are able to test the boundaries of behaviour in a safe environment.
Occasionally there are children who behave well at home but not at school. However, it is
not just the social side where parents have expertise and interest.
All parents want their children to do academically well at school. They have high
expectations of their children and hence high expectations of you. You may occasionally
hear people complaining about the fact that some parents do not care about their children.
This is rarely true, although sometimes parents’ lives, particularly if they are in extreme
poverty, make it more of a challenge to support the educational needs of their children.
Some parents who are professionals themselves—possibly in the education service—
can ask searching questions about the ways that you teach their children. These moments
should not been seen as threats but more as opportunities. Having moved from innercity
teaching to a relatively affluent suburb I was warned about ‘pushy middle-class parents’
by some of my colleagues. In the event I found that most of them were very interested to
discuss teaching and learning in addition to a range of other topical educational issues.
They also had a refreshing common-sense attitude to some educational issues that had
become unhelpfully dominated by politics. The vast majority of parents from a range of
backgrounds are genuinely interested in your views of teaching approaches and enjoy
engaging in discussion.
The idea of home-school agreements is a recent idea. Schools and parents agree the
kinds of things they will promise to do and this is then made formal by the signing of a
document. In the best schools this can be used as a way of negotiating with parents,
developing a better relationship and clarifying the needs of both parties. One of the
dangers is that this can be another one-sided requirement from schools. A common
responsibility for parents in the home-school agreement is that they will ensure that their
children will do homework.
The amount of homework that primary children are expected to do has increased in
recent years. As a teacher you are expected to set homework for the children in your class
but the amount is up to you. It is difficult enough to respond to all the work that the
children do in class, so with the addition of homework there can be real time pressures.
One of the answers to this is to set fewer homework activities but with a higher quality of
learning. You should resist the temptation to resort to poor-quality photocopied
worksheets. The ideal homework activities extend the work in the classroom and are then
built on in subsequent lessons. In the early years, sending books home to be shared with
family members followed by notes made in reading diaries has been good practice for
many years. ‘Story sacks’ which include a book along with puppets and games have also
been successfully used by a number of educational authorities.
Another example of a productive homework activity involved my daughter, who was
once asked to make a list of objects and find out how heavy they were in kilograms. This
required noting the mass of things in the supermarket and weighing various objects at
home. We tabulated the information using the computer and this was then used to support
other work back in the classroom. At the other extreme, a poorly written maths worksheet
was once sent home that even we could not understand, let alone our daughter. In the end
a chance conversation with another parent solved the mystery.
One of the most interesting aspects of the home-school link is the way learning takes
place in both settings. I have already indicated how you need to see parents as experts on
their own children. This knowledge can be enhanced by a better understanding of the
ways children learn at home. This sometimes reveals itself when the child brings
something they have done at home to show you at school. It might be a drawing, an
object, some writing, an explanation about an exciting event and so on. All these
moments should be valued because they are a positive sign that the child is enjoying
learning. In discussion with the child they also give you a further glimpse of their
learning at home. The parallel to this is when children choose to continue and extend at
home some aspect of learning that has been going on in the classroom. This is a clear sign
that what you are doing in the classroom is interesting.
Teamwork
In any modern workplace one of the key features of success is teamwork. If you are not
an instinctive teamworker you need to develop these skills. You will probably have met
people who are difficult to communicate with and who tend to prefer working alone.
Unfortunately this kind of attitude to work in the educational environment is rarely
helpful. One of the clear benefits of teamworking is the greater efficiency it allows. For
example, schools that have more than one class in each year group often encourage
teachers to share planning, which reduces the workload dramatically. It also helps to
ensure that children in parallel classes of the same age group receive similar experiences.
In nursery and reception settings teamwork is particularly important where you are
expected to collaborate with a range of other adults when planning the curriculum.
As a trainee teacher your teamworking abilities will be called upon straight away.
Imagine that you are about to enter your first placement in a school. You will have
phoned the school and checked the directions and travel arrangements carefully in order
to arrive in good time on the first morning. You will have dressed smartly: schools vary
in their style of dress but it is always better to err on the side of too smart rather than
appear too casual on your first visit. Once you arrive at the school the secretary or school
administrator will probably greet you, although it might be the headteacher. First
impressions are important, so remember to introduce yourself and explain why you are
there. You might then be introduced to a teacher who coordinates the work with students
(often called a mentor). The mentor may have planned an introductory session to
familiarise you with the school. There may be other students in the school at the same
time as you, particularly in large schools.
The ability to work with your peers is just as important as relating to all the other
people in the school. Usually there are a few people in a year group with whom you don’t
get on. The professional nature of the training means that you need to make an effort to
communicate positively with all people. School experience should not be a competitive
one. In fact the best students often reveal their ability to work productively with their
peers, even if they would not choose to socialise with them at other times.
One of the most important people with whom to develop a good sense of teamwork is
the teacher whose class you will be working in. In your early teaching experiences you
will be carefully guided about the kinds of work that you can help with. This will often
involve working with groups of children during English and mathematics lessons. In your
final practice you will take much more responsibility, but remember that even in this
practice you are still being trained and would not be expected to take on the same
responsibility as an employed teacher. Modern partnerships between schools and
universities (and other organisations) mean that the teacher with whom you work and/or
the mentor in the school will have responsibility for assessing how well your practice
went. Their judgements are usually checked (or ‘moderated’) by the university tutor; all
the more reason to ensure that you have a positive working relationship with your class
teacher.
There may be occasions when you do not feel that you have a natural rapport with
your class teacher. In these cases look for the things that you can learn—after all,
everyone has strengths and diplomatically ignore things that you might not agree with.
This was a strategy I had to use in my final teaching practice, as the following anecdote
illustrates.
My final practice was in a small town in Kent which was part of the outer suburbs of
London. When I met my class teacher for the first time I soon realised that we had quite
different ideas about how children learn. She was very much an ‘old school’ style of
teacher and deputy head of the school. I had been inspired by the modern ideas of my
training and was very much ‘new school’—if there is such a thing! We were both cordial
but did not really get on well. At one point she took issue with my clothes. A washing
disaster meant that for the first time I did not have a proper shirt on and was forced to
wear a T-shirt under my jacket. She mentioned this to the headteacher who suggested that
this was deliberate and in some way related to the visit of the external examiner the
following day. As it happened, the external examiner was particularly impressed by my
work in the classroom (and by then I had the required pristine ironed shirt!). Ironically—
in the light of recent moves towards more formal teaching—he suggested that I might
think about introducing even more flexibility into the classroom’s organisation and
activities. This was in spite of the fact that he saw a carousel of four activities on that day
(see Chapter 3). At the end of the practice the teacher with whom I had been working
received her bottle of gin that she had heavily hinted would be a suitable leaving present!
Although we both recognised that we had not particularly hit it off she admitted that I
was the first student over all the years who she had felt totally confident to leave in
charge of her class—which she did for long periods. In retrospect I regard this as
something of a compliment coming from someone who disagreed quite strongly with my
ideas. One of the things I learned from this experience was the importance of joining a
settled and well-organised class. The other thing I learned with hindsight was the
important professional relationship that exists between a deputy head and the
headteacher.
As a student you will often not have much contact with the head-teacher, unless they
also happen to be your mentor, but they are the key figure in the school. At the end of the
day all decisions rest with the head. The headteacher usually has one deputy
(occasionally two deputies in very large schools) and other teachers with extra
responsibilities who make up the management team. These people are all important in
helping schools to move forward and facilitate improvements, but it is the head with
whom it is vital to form a positive working relationship.
As a newly qualified teacher, one aspect of your reputation will rest with the views of
the people with whom you come into contact in the school community. Cleaners, cooks,
lollipop people, dinner supervisors, classroom helpers and so on may all have a view
about you as a person and hence as a teacher. Often, perhaps a little unfairly, they will
make judgements based on only brief contact with you. Your job is to ensure that their
views are positive.
Chapter 2
Organising the classroom
What’s so special about tables, chairs and cupboards?
Think about thirty pupils in one room. Now imagine the

amount of movement each pupil in that room undertakes in
one day: collecting resources, going to the toilet,
discussing displays, going to assembly, running errands,
moving to another activity area and so on. One of the most
important reasons for careful thought about the
organisation of the furniture in your classroom is because
of this movement. If routes are clear and resources
accessible you will avoid some problems straight away.
Space and furniture
Many people have had experience of working in primary schools before they train as
teachers. At these times and when you are on teaching practice there is usually not much
opportunity to organise the classroom as you would like it. One of the satisfying features
of starting your first job is that the classroom space is your own to design in a way which
suits your teaching. The way you organise your classroom sends a clear message about
your expectations and standards, and reflects the particular ethos you wish to create.
There are many ways in which classrooms may be organised: from chairs in rows, to
rooms divided up into separate curriculum/ experience areas. Before you start lugging
heavy furniture around it can sometimes help to create a scale map of the classroom. All
the furniture in the room can be recorded on the map by using card shapes. Try several
arrangements to see what the classroom might look like. Think carefully about the
positions of sinks, carpet areas, radiators, the blackboard/flipchart/overhead projector,
display boards and so on in relation to your tables and chairs.
The position of the board (chalk or dry-wipe) can strongly influence how you organise
the classroom. It is amazing how even something as mundane as a board can attract
debate. At one time they started to fall out of fashion and teachers used them as display
boards. Recently there has been a renewed emphasis on ‘chalk and talk’ whole class
teaching. At these times all the children in your class will need to be able to see the board
clearly. It is also important to remember that some children may have particular visual
requirements and may need to sit nearer the board, require larger board writing and/or the
use of particular colours.
The horizontal surfaces of cupboards are important spaces for display and storage, and
these displays are often enhanced by the clever use of bright fabrics with objects
Organising the classroom 15
underneath to create different levels. When used for storage, some early years teachers
cover the surface with coloured laminated papers and draw shapes to indicate where
different storage containers are placed. These have the names of the objects written on
them so that children associate the written word with the placement of the objects. Where
possible you should aim to make your displays ‘interactive’. Vertical displays can pose
questions, be added to on a daily basis, pose problems. Horizontal displays can encourage
hands-on learning which is something that some of the fantastic modern museums and
exhibitions have done on a much larger scale. Examples include: a collection of books for
author of the week; a collection of artefacts with information; a snailery; a puzzle to
solve. Children’s own ideas can also be supported. For example, I remember when two of
the boys in my class chose to set up a wonderful display of interesting rocks and gems
which they had encouraged the class to bring in. They also researched the information
and wrote small information cards for the children to read.
Most classroom walls are not very appealing, so teachers have developed considerable
skills to make them more attractive in order to support learning. The overall aim should
be to make sure that the classroom is an inviting place for children to walk into.
Remember that you do not need to change displays too often: focus on high-quality ethos
first. I am not talking about all teachers being great artists here, although it is amazing to
see how art specialists approach this work, including artists who take up residencies in
the school.
Display work was something that I was not instinctively good at, so at one of the
schools I taught in I found a brilliant deputy head who showed me the tricks of the trade.
The first thing she taught me was about the kind of paper used for backing the wall
display board. Sugar paper is cheap but it quickly fades; there are better quality papers
that do not. Some schools have experimented with fabric backings including hessian, or
simply painting notice-boards. Work that is put on the wall often looks good when it is
mounted on a neutral colour that matches the background and which does not detract
from the child’s work. This often has an approximately 5mm border. Believe it or not
there have been arguments about whether the mounting and border should be single,
double or triple! The backed display board itself is also often given a border. Teachers
also often make effective use of large cutout lettering for the titles of display boards and a
range of large computer fonts for accompanying comments.
The portrayal of children’s work is important. I believe children’s work should be
displayed without any changes made by the teacher. This means that for children who are
still in the early stages of spelling you may decide to put work on display that is not
spelled a hundred per cent correctly. You will have helped them in early drafts but the
final product should be left uncorrected, since one of the main reasons for displaying
work is to value the child’s contribution. Similarly, artwork should never be touched up
for display reasons.
One of the tests of the success of your classroom organisation is the event that comes
at the end of the day and that most of us dislike: tidying up. Careful labelling of storage
areas is helpful here. It is important to make sure that you establish routines for this very
early on. The first thing is that every object in the classroom must have a place. Teachers
adopt various strategies for tidying up but I have found the most efficient is if everyone in
the class has a designated job. This might be to tidy one area or check a particular
resource, such as felt pens, or to look after one cupboard and so on. The list of jobs can
be rotated from time to time so that children do not become too bored doing the same job
each day. The children’s own drawers or trays also need to be regularly tidied, perhaps
once each half term. It is amazing the way some children hoard things.
I remember an inspirational advisory teacher with whom I worked in London who said
‘Remember that the classroom is yours as well as the children’s’. The teacher’s desk and
cupboard are important areas for keeping a range of resources that help you do your job.
Although you spend most of your teaching time interacting with children sitting with
them at their tables or in whole class discussion, it is occasionally useful to work with a
child at your own desk. Perhaps some one-to-one reading or helping them with an
individual piece of writing. It can also relieve your aching body if you have been sitting
on tiny infant chairs for most of the day! The classroom is partly your space, and you
may want to imprint your character in the kinds of things you choose to bring into the
classroom: a favourite chair, favourite artwork, artefacts and so on.
Seating
The decisions you make about where children sit are determined by the kind of teaching
you are doing and what you aim to achieve. Some teachers have convincingly argued that
the layout of the furniture needs to change depending on the aims of the learning.
Children can be taught to safely move tables and chairs into different arrangements when
appropriate. However, in reality classroom layouts often remain fairly static. In the past,
strong arguments were put forward for the practice of dividing classrooms into activity/
curriculum area bays. This has the advantage of ensuring that the resources related to a
particular curriculum area are located conveniently for the children. In the early years this
practice is still used, and examples of areas include: carpet area for story, snacks,
discussion, singing and so on; art/design and general ‘messy’ activities; listening stations;
sand; water; outdoor play; role play; reading; mark-making. In nursery and reception,
children are rarely required to be involved in chalk and talk.
Whole class teaching requires you to think about whether the tables and chairs are
arranged in small groups, pairs or rows. Even the fairly straightforward idea of placing
chairs in rows means that there are further things to consider. The location of individual
children needs some thought. The fairest system is to allow children to decide where they
want to sit. However, there will be some children who do not choose who to sit with very
wisely. This may result in too much time wasted when they are not concentrating on their
work. As a teacher you have to make a decision which respects children’s rights but also
one which ensures that learning is productive. The sanction of saying ‘You can sit with
Janice provided you work hard’ can be useful.
Whole class work often takes place in a carpeted area of the classroom. This can be a
more comfortable area where it is possible to see the whole group more easily. The
atmosphere can be more cosy and relaxing. However, there are also some things to watch
out for. When children are sat quite close together there is a temptation to touch other
children nearby and distract them. It is worth keeping an eye on those children who find
it difficult to sit still and concentrate. You may decide to sit them nearer to you if you
anticipate that they might cause trouble for other children. Carpet areas often benefit from
attractive large cushions which are more comfortable for the children; but for some
classes these can be a source of argument, so it may be necessary to have some kind of
informal rota.
Two comfortable armchairs in this area can be useful (I even saw one teacher put a
sofa in the carpet area). One of these might be for you to sit on when you are teaching the
children, including reading to them, and the other for the children to sit on. It can be used
as a reward for good work; its other use might be for ‘hot-seating’ (see p.8).
Much of your teaching will be with small groups as they engage in the activities that
you have planned for them. You will need to sit with them so that you can interact with
them. This means that you will need space to sit down. If there is no chair for you to sit
on then you will be forced to bend down. Quite apart from the fact that this is bad for
your back it is more difficult to maintain eye contact, and the teaching and learning is
rarely as productive. In an ideal classroom you should have one spare chair in each group
to allow you to sit with them.
Many schools are open plan or semi-open plan, which means that the classrooms are
not entirely closed rooms, namely four walls with a door. In open-plan schools there are
usually shared areas outside the class’s base area. Once again it is important to think
carefully about the children you choose to work in these shared areas. The shared areas
are often not in your line of vision unless you are working with the group, so the children
have to be trusted to work independently. This is not a problem for the vast majority of
children who enjoy the change in environment and independence that this gives. As for
so many behaviour issues the rule has to be ‘innocent until proven guilty’ on a daily
basis. It would be unfair to deny children access to these ‘special’ opportunities, so it is
expected that they will work well when they have the opportunity.
Grouping children
For some time it has been agreed that a mix of whole class teaching, small group and
individual work is the most productive way of supporting learning. One of the practical
benefits of dividing the whole class into small groups is that there is more flexibility for
activities. For example, hands-on experience such as finding out the mass of different
objects using scales may be carried out with a smaller amount of equipment. If you tried
to do this with the whole class you might need fifteen or more sets of scales.
All group work requires you to make decisions about the constitution of the groups,
even if this decision is to encourage the children to decide on their own groups. One
option is through the use of ‘mixed ability’ groups. One of the educational advantages is
that children of different levels of achievement in different subjects can learn from each
other. If you remember the section about attitudes to children, I commented on being
positive about their potential. This includes the belief that everyone has something to
offer and that we can learn something from all people. In terms of mixed ability grouping
the idea is that all children can learn something from any one of their peers. Mixed ability
grouping is also built on the idea that grouping children by ability can be divisive. One of
the real dangers of ability grouping is that the self-esteem of the children in the lowest
groups can be damaged. They begin to feel that they are not very clever, and this may
result in a self-fulfilling prophecy which threatens their learning.
‘Ability groups’ are groups which are chosen on the basis of children’s ‘ability’. In
primary schools, ability grouping means that children are put into different small groups
within their class according to their attainment. This usually varies according to different
subject areas, although it most commonly applies to English and maths. It is similar to the
concept of ‘sets’ in secondary schools, the only difference being that the children stay
with the same teacher, unlike in secondary where they are taught by different teachers.
Having said that, in recent years significant numbers of primary schools have been using
sets for English and maths, with children moving to different classrooms and different
teachers. One of the problems with ability grouping is that in the past some primary
teachers have used single ability groups for all subjects out of convenience. This is more
akin to the secondary practice of ‘streaming’ where children stay in top, middle or bottom
streams irrespective of their attainments in different subjects.
The practical benefit of grouping children by ability is that you can match your
teaching directly to the learning levels of each group. In particular this enables you to
challenge children with high attainment and it has been argued that it can support
children with low attainment as well. There is some research which suggests that ability
grouping can be beneficial in raising standards of achievement. However, importantly the
research also reveals that if standards are to rise there are a number of conditions:
children should be regularly and rigorously assessed; the results of these assessments
should allow them to change ability groups regularly, and the work set for different
groups should be genuinely different; if it is not there is little point in grouping by ability.
In reality, time constraints mean that these conditions are often not met so that children
remain trapped in inappropriate ability groups and carry out work which is not
sufficiently different.
Which ever groupings you choose, it is important that the children are clear about the
groups they are in. You will need to provide lists on the wall so that children can check
their group for different subjects, although they are quick to memorise this kind of
information. Teachers often use memorable names for their groups such as names of
animals, colours, plants and so on. This is often an attempt to disguise the fact that the
groups are based on achievement. Unfortunately children are often wise to this! I
remember as a primary child myself that the teacher in what was then the fourth year
juniors (year 6) used to group us all in streamed ability groups. I was in the top group (I
am not showing off, this is all part of the point…honestly!) but there was one girl in
particular who seemed to do better than me in most things. One day the teacher put us all
through a standardised reading test. I still remember seeing the scores in his mark book:
Sarah scored 106 and I scored 105, much to my dissatisfaction, which all goes to show
that children are pretty much on the ball when it comes to things like ability grouping.
The trick is to respect their rights to information about themselves and their progress,
while at the same time protecting their self-esteem.
I have discussed mixed ability and ability grouping. There are other forms of grouping
that need consideration. Working in pairs is often a very successful way of encouraging a
simple form of collaborative work. The acid test for collaboration is that there should be
only one written outcome, if writing is required. Two children sitting together working on
identical pieces of work are not really collaborating, even if they help each other. When
you organise pairs work there are several options. You might choose friendship pairs for
reasons of motivation and enjoyment. Similar attainment pairs may be chosen for reasons
of learning needs. Different attainment pairs can enable one child to support the other,
and in the process consolidate their own learning through the act of teaching.
Boys and girls have different needs, and one way of addressing these can be through
single sex grouping. One example is the way some boys can dominate practical apparatus
such as construction sets: Lego, Polydron, Connex and so on. In order to afford girls an
equal opportunity to develop their motor skills, single sex grouping allows them to work
in a different way than they might when boys are present. Similarly, boys can be
encouraged to engage with activities that they might not normally choose. The thinking
that underpins such groupings is to do with equal opportunities. Clearly this also applies
to ethnic minority children who may benefit from groupings which reflect their language
and culture. This is difficult if there are very small numbers of such children, but many
schools have significant populations of multilingual pupils. It can be very beneficial to
them if occasionally they are grouped together so that they can use all the languages at
their disposal in order to tackle learning activities.
Chapter 3
Planning the curriculum
Why is the curriculum such an important feature of the job?
The raison d’être of the teacher’s job is learning. This

learning is delivered through activities, and the way these
activities are structured is called the curriculum. There is
an infinite number of ways of structuring the curriculum
and there are many influences. The children, schools, local
education authorities, teachers, parents, society, business
and government can all influence the curriculum.
Influences on planning
The most important feature of the curriculum is that it should meet children’s learning
needs. This implies that teachers need to have a good understanding of the children
whom they teach. One way of doing this is the development of sophisticated observation,
interaction and other assessment skills. Observation and interaction enable the teacher to
surmise what children need, but teachers can also actively ask children about their
interests, preferences and needs. This was common in schools that pursued ‘child-centred
education’ during the 1970s and 1980s and is still highly thought of by many teachers.
As an example of curriculum planning in a child-centred environment I describe a
process that was common from the late 1960s onwards. Teaching in the primary school
was typically organised into ‘topics’. These were units of work which were centred
around one theme such as ourselves, transport, food, celebrations and so on. As much of
the curriculum as possible was related to these themes. This did not mean that all work
was related to the theme, but the links did create coherence for children. It was argued
that their thinking tended not to be in subjects but more by association between related
ideas so that teaching and learning should be ‘cross-curricular’. One of the first things I
used to do at the start of a new topic was to encourage the children to brainstorm all the
things that they knew about the topic. I also asked them to think about the things that they
would like to know more about. This immediately enabled me to match my activity
planning with their interests. As the work progressed, my assessment made me realise the
kinds of activities that would be best suited to take their learning forward. Activities
themselves were also often cross-curricular. For example, think about the learning that
takes place when children are encouraged to develop their own drama in collaboration
with a small group. What happens when they realise that they need to make props and
costumes? As their rehearsals continue they see the need to finalise dialogue, and this
means writing, drafting, reading and learning. Final rehearsals might be videoed in order
to reflect on how to improve. This kind of learning draws on many subjects, blurs the
boundaries and is cross-curricular.
In recent times the National Curriculum has become the biggest influence on planning,
since it describes programmes of study that must be covered during the child’s time at
primary school and beyond. It is made up of ten subjects: English, maths, science, design
and technology (DT), information and communication technology (ICT), history,
geography, art and design, music, and physical education (PE). Other requirements
include religious education (RE); spiritual, moral, social and cultural development; and
personal, social and health education and citizenship. The early years of education from
ages 3 to 5 are now covered by the Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage
document (QCA 2000) and this identifies several key areas of learning: personal, social
and emotional development; communication, language and literacy; mathematical
development; knowledge and understanding of the world; physical development, and
creative development. It is not possible to include lengthy discussions about all the
subjects of the National Curriculum in a book of this kind, and besides, there are many
books that address the different subjects in great detail (some of these are recommended
in the further reading section). However, I will describe some of the subject-specific
issues, leaving literacy and numeracy until last.
Science, like English and maths, is one of the core curriculum subjects. In recent years
the emphasis on literacy and numeracy has led to science, as with many other subjects,
receiving less attention. However, in some ways this has been helpful because there has
been a more gradual and perhaps realistic development of science teaching approaches.
For a long time one of the central issues has been about the place of scientific
investigations. Some teachers have found this area of science to be quite a challenge, yet
it is one of the most exciting. Children are encouraged to investigate problems. For
example, what happens to your heart rate if you spend one minute on different kinds of
exercises? If you take several spherical objects, which will roll furthest past the end of a
slope? What happens to seedlings if you remove water, or light, or air? Collaborative
work is often very productive in this context, with discussion involved in planning the
investigation, shared recording of the results, and finding imaginative ways to present the
findings.
Art is a fundamental part of the primary curriculum. If you think about the early stages
of learning, children communicate on paper using numbers, letters and drawings. This
early distinction evolves into the different subjects of maths, English and art. At its best,
art allows children to fully express themselves through various mediums such as paint,
clay, pastel, charcoal, pencil, the computer and so on. The computer strengthens the links
between design and art in a similar way to the creative processes that are involved when
children make models. Although children need to be taught various artistic skills and can
imitate well-known artists, this should all be done to improve their ability to express their
own creative thoughts.
Many people argue that the health benefits of PE mean that it should be a core subject.
The fact that PE is a subject that many primary children particularly enjoy also adds to its
status. Gymnastics involves children being set open-ended tasks that they can approach at
their level. The idea of thirty children lined up behind a vault for most of their PE lessons
is thankfully a thing of the past. Opportunities for collaboration and the planning of
Planning the curriculum 23
sequences of movements provide a creative element to PE. Games work gives children
the opportunity to explore a range of game formats in small groups. The key concepts of
games such as football, hockey, tennis and cricket are translated into activities for small
groups of children which are less intimidating than full team games. Competitive
approaches are balanced against those which encourage a focus on personal and team
improvement.
Music has been called the Cinderella of the curriculum because it tends to be
neglected more than most. Although most primary teachers feel confident to teach all the
other subjects, when it comes to music there is often a feeling that it is best taught by
experts. Although it is true that in all subjects people who are trained to high levels can
offer something different to the generalist, this does not mean that there is nothing a
generalist can offer. It is also the case that non-specialists often have a particular
enthusiasm for subjects that can enrich what the subject expert has to offer. My own
experience as a musician sheds some light on this. My first degree was in music which I
studied at the Royal Academy of Music. I was fortunate to work as a viola player before I
retrained as a teacher. When I started working in primary schools I found that people
naturally asked me to help with music and in one school I took on a coordinating role.
However, over time I began to realise that although I loved doing music with my own
class I was not enjoying some of the other coordination activities such as leading singing
or school orchestras, nor did I have the enthusiasm for co-ordinating music that I had for
my emerging interest in English. Part of the attraction of English was that it was a
different subject from my degree but not completely unrelated. In America, English is
sometimes described as a ‘language art’ and it was the creative side of English that
interested me at first. Thus all primary teachers have things to offer children as part of the
music curriculum, particularly if they give children direct opportunities to compose,
perform and listen on a regular basis.
ICT continues to offer considerable opportunities for children’s learning but there are
dangers that its importance can be exaggerated. The best use of ICT is where children are
encouraged to use powerful applications packages like word-processors, databases, web
authoring packages, spreadsheets, presentation packages and so on in order to support the
development of their thinking. Even a package as common as a word-processor enables
children to develop sophisticated publications which can include images and a wide
variety of presentational features. The opportunities for redrafting are of course another
major advantage. Unfortunately it is skills-based packages that tend to dominate
computer use, such as phonics, grammar, spelling and basic arithmetic. These kinds of
packages vary in quality and need to be used sparingly for the purpose of consolidating
skills learned in other classroom activities.
History and geography lend themselves well to topic-based approaches. Some of the
most interesting work can emerge from the exploration of the local environment and
beyond. A well-planned walking trip to discover features that children may not have been
aware of can lead to artwork, discussion, map reading, hypothesising, and much more.
The developments in modern museums and exhibitions also provide outstanding stimuli
for children’s historical, geographical and other learning. The website of the Natural
History Museum is a good example of how Internet resources continue to improve. There
are also some excellent sites which enable children to access maps and aerial
photographs.
RE features some of the greatest stories ever told, full of themes that have been used
again and again by story-tellers. The fact that stories are a feature of all societies enables
you to explore multicultural aspects of life. Philosophical questions about the existence of
God and the range of beliefs held by different religions can open up new modes of
thinking for children.
In recent years the teaching frameworks from the national literacy and numeracy
strategies (NLS and NNS) have added to the detail of the curriculum and are now
included as part of the National Curriculum. One of the significant changes the literacy
and numeracy frameworks brought was a move away from programmes of study to
‘objectives’. A teaching objective is a statement of the learning that should have been
achieved by the end of a teaching period. In literacy and mathematics, teaching objectives
are specified for each term of the child’s life at primary school. Objectives have become
an essential part of planning for lessons. When you start writing your lesson plans, their
success will in part be attributed to how well you write your objectives and the extent to
which the whole plan, and thus the lesson, relates to them. Teachers are now sharing their
objectives with the children in their class at the start of lessons and reminding them
throughout. Although the objectives are linked to particular years and terms, not all
children develop at the same rate, which means that you have to ‘differentiate’ for their
needs.
Differentiation is the strategy of offering different experiences for children based on
your assessment of their learning needs. Imagine you are planning a whole class lesson.
The introduction is to be followed by an activity designed to take the learning forward.
For your introduction you might differentiate by using varied levels of questioning and
interaction for individual children. As far as the activity is concerned, the most basic
differentiation will require you to have some kind of extension work or follow-on activity
for those children who finish first. What about the children who might struggle with the
activity from the beginning? You may need to modify the activity so that they can get
maximum benefit from it.
Differentiation often caters for three levels: low attainment, middle attainment and
high attainment. There are three main ways that you can differentiate: by activities,
support and resources. The most extreme form of differentiation by activity involves the
planning of separate activities for different groups of children. However, this can be
intensive for the teacher’s planning and organisation. If you consider that there might be
at least five lessons per day this could quickly become fifteen activities per day which is
seventy-five per week. You would quickly burn out at that rate! The more common way
involves modifying a core activity. You plan extension work (and/or a more advanced
starting point) for children who have high attainment in the subject and simplified work
for children who have low attainment, all of which is still closely related to the core
activity which most children in the class carry out. Differentiation by activity can also be
achieved through the use of ‘open-ended’ tasks. A writing task may be open ended; for
example, writing a story. Maths problem-solving and science investigations are also
examples of open-ended tasks. In tasks like these the differentiation is sometimes
described as ‘by outcome’.
Differentiation by support means the kind of support that you and any classroom
assistants give to the children. It is quite common to ask classroom assistants to give extra
support to low attainment groups but it is worth remembering that these children often
demand the greatest teaching skills, so it is important that you work regularly with them
as well. Differentiation by resources means that you offer some children modified or
extra resources to help them complete the task. For example, work on adding numbers
greater than 10 might be supported by tens and units cubes and rods.
Planning formats
Most people would agree that the best teaching is thoroughly planned. However, before I
go on to discuss the ways in which teaching is planned, it is worth remembering that
there are occasions when spontaneous unplanned teaching creates some of the most
memorable learning. Think back to one of your favourite teachers, then think back to one
of their lessons: to what extent do you think it was planned? One of my favourite
secondary teachers was an English teacher called Geoff Bower. On one occasion we had
been talking about telepathy. The next lesson he sat at the front and drew a picture on his
piece of paper; we all had to do the same. Nobody was allowed to see any of the
drawings in the room. The first time he drew a house, and it turned out that one of the
class had drawn the same. Not particularly unusual, you will probably be thinking, as it is
a very common choice of drawing. The second time he drew a chicken, and this same
child once again drew the same. You can imagine the kind of speculation, debate and
excitement this caused for much of the class. This lesson was probably planned in his
head, and my guess is that none of it was written down. The fact that I remember this
lesson some twenty years later is a mark of how significant it was for me.
Planning is commonly described in three levels: short term, medium term and long
term. Short-term planning is usually daily or weekly. Medium-term planning refers to
planning for terms and half terms. Long-term planning tends to mean planning for a year
or more. It is useful to think about the NLS Framework for Teaching (DfEE 1998a) for
examples of these different levels of planning.
The main part of Framework for Teaching consists of lists of objectives that have to
be taught at specified times during the year. These objectives have been designed to
support the National Curriculum programmes of study for English, reading and writing in
particular (most of the programmes of study for speaking and listening are not included in
the NLS Framework for Teaching). The framework covers the years from the final term
in reception up to year 6 and as such is a long-term plan. In the framework folder,
examples are given of recommended medium- and short-term planning formats that
teachers are strongly encouraged to adopt. Figure 3.1 is the recommended format for
medium-term literacy planning.
The teacher has to make two main decisions for this level of planning. The first is to
decide which objectives will be covered continuously and which will be part of a blocked
unit of work. For example, the ability to decode words when reading using a range of
strategies is a continuous objective. Learning about some particular aspects of play
scripts might be covered as blocked work. Blocked work may either be one lesson or a
whole series of lessons. As far as short-term planning in the framework is concerned,
teachers are expected to use the ‘weekly plan’. Figure 3.2 is the recommended format for
short-term literacy planning.
Figure 3.1 The recommended format for medium-term

literacy planning
The important thing about the weekly plan is that it links with the objectives set out in the
medium-term plan. The teacher notes down the activities they intend to do with the
children in the boxes provided. The literacy hour was originally based on an hour
structured as follows: fifteen minutes’ shared text work; fifteen minutes’ wordor
sentence-level work; twenty minutes’ guided and independent small group activities; and
a ten-minute plenary. However, many teachers found this structure too inflexible, so you
will notice many variations. The columns in the weekly plan reflect the different teaching
in the hour beginning with whole class work, proceeding to group work and concluding
with the whole class plenary. The teacher will also indicate differentiation within this
plan—they are often enlarged to A3 size to fit this all in!
As a trainee teacher you will be expected to do another form of short-term planning as
well: the lesson plan. Most qualified teachers do not do detailed individual lesson plans.
This is because they are qualified and experienced, so do not require the same depth of
planning as trainees. They also often have responsibilities beyond their own class, and as
there are only twenty-four hours in a day something has to give. The reason trainee
teachers do lesson plans is so that mentors and tutors have a window on the thinking
which has gone on behind the planning. Figure 3.3 is an example of a lesson plan format
and is useful in discussion of some of the issues.
In recent years, inspectors have strongly emphasised the importance of short-term

learning objectives. Hence, objectives have become one of the most important aspects of
any lesson plan. The objectives link everything else that is written on the lesson plan.
This means that the activities you plan must be closely matched to the objectives. As far
as literacy and numeracy are concerned the frameworks are themselves lists of objectives,
so the most sensible approach is to copy your objectives for the lesson from these
documents (or add a numbered reference). My own feeling is that any more than three
objectives in a one-hour lesson are difficult to deliver. Even the delivery of one objective
can be demanding because there may be differentiated activities and you may plan to
make written assessments of the children’s achievements during the lesson. All this
organisation requires considerable time for planning and considerable skills during the
lesson. If you multiply this by three (i.e. if there were three objectives) you can see how
the planning and complexity of the lesson increases.
There is also an expectation that most of the work you do will be linked to the
National Curriculum. Over the past ten years of the National Curriculum primary schools
have made superhuman efforts to map and monitor their coverage of the National
Curriculum. This process has been started yet again with the implementation of the
National Curriculum 2000. Your own lesson planning will add detailed evidence that you
are covering the National Curriculum.
Some objectives may need to be broken down and may require sequences of lessons.
The issues of continuity and progression feature here. Any lesson is part of a sequence of
learning; even a one-off lesson will relate in some way to what has been and what is to
come. But when you plan a sequence of lessons you will establish continuity from one
lesson to the next. Assessment is very important in this respect in that your assessments
of the children’s achievements should affect the way you plan subsequent lessons. For
skilled teachers this is a natural process where their thoughts about lessons, based on their
perceptive observations of children at work, feed into their future planning. In recent
years there has been pressure to show this process in writing; hence lesson plans for
trainees require them to indicate continuity and progression.
Figure 3.2 The recommended format for short-term literacy

planning
Your objectives will also influence the kinds of interaction you have with the children.
There will be key questions in your mind that you want to ask them. There will be
particular definitions that you will want them to learn. When lesson plans ask for
teaching points it is better to be really specific rather than make general comments about
what you hope to achieve.
Figure 3.3 An example of a lesson plan format
Activities
So far, any reference to activities has been from a teacher’s perspective: you design the
activities to support your learning objectives. Let us look at the experience from the
child’s perspective for a moment.
Sally arrives for another day at school. She’s had a bad night because her
little sister who sleeps in the same room has a terrible cough and was
crying. Mum and dad were hassling them to hurry up, get dressed and eat
breakfast. Just as Sally was really getting into a wonderful drawing of a
fish on a multi-coloured symmetrical pattern background dad loses his rag
and shouts at the children to ‘Hurry up!’ The school morning always starts
with the literacy hour followed by the daily mathematics lesson. School is
a bit boring when it is the same every day but sometimes something really
interesting happens. Like on Pancake day when all the class got to make a
pancake and eat it or when they do PE or when the teacher tells stories
about her cat.
Children are not particularly interested in lesson plans, objectives, differentiation,

assessment. Their main thought will be: ‘Is this activity interesting?’ If the answer to this
question is ‘yes’ then you are tapping into their natural motivation, and learning is more
likely to take place. Think back on your own education both in school and out of it. I bet
you can think of occasions when you were really fired up about something and the
intensity of learning was strong.
In recent years there has been a tendency to ignore children’s interests and rights. The
past ten years have seen numerous initiatives to raise standards all done in children’s
‘best interests’, but rarely have the children themselves been asked about all this. You,
though, will work with them every day, you will develop strong relationships with them.
You will feel a natural desire to make their learning as enjoyable as possible, and one of
the ways of doing this is through activity planning.
One way to find out what interests children is to ask them directly. Questions like ‘Are
you enjoying this?’; ‘What’s your favourite subject?’; ‘What would you like to learn
about?’ are all ways of getting feedback from children. A more informal approach is to be
aware of the kinds of things they talk about, and to encourage them to bring things to
school and to use them as part of the curriculum. I remember on one occasion Hafsa
brought in a local newspaper clipping which was about different ways to treat conkers to
toughen them up. I discussed this with the class, then suggested that we might like to set
up an investigation. The children made all kinds of suggestions as to how we might do
this. In the end we decided to use three treatments: vinegar, baking and no treatment. The
conkers were then weighed and the depth measured. Small ‘G’ clamps were used and the
number of turns of the screw before the conker split was taken as a measure. I still
remember the windy Saturday morning collecting hundreds of conkers. For those of you
who want to perfect your conkering skills, however, I’m afraid I cannot remember which
method came out best!
There are many ways to find ideas for activities. The best way is for you to think about
what you want the children to learn and then create a suitable activity. If you create the
activity yourself you usually achieve a much closer match between the activity and a
particular child’s assessed needs. This creative process can of course involve you
pinching ideas from all kinds of sources: colleagues, the Internet, published materials,
etc.
It can be very tempting to overuse published worksheets. These materials sometimes
save you a little time but there are considerable dangers. The main problem is that the
writers of the materials cannot possibly know about the learning needs of your class.
Because of this the activities they suggest often aim for the needs of an average child of a
particular age. The learning objectives are often rather unclear, which makes your
teaching different from when you have created the activity yourself and have the
objectives uppermost in your mind throughout the lesson. Too often, even commercially
successful published schemes contain poor activities and generally their use, without
adaptation, is not regarded as ‘good practice’.
There is an expectation that ICT should be used to enhance most lessons. The vast
majority of schools have computers that are linked to the Internet. Many schools have
designated rooms with suites of computers, others have computers in each classroom. My
personal preference is for five or six computers in the ordinary classroom because then
you can always have at least one group working on them. However, even one machine in
a room can be a powerful resource. One of the problems in achieving this has been
teachers’ reluctance to allow children to use computers for fear that they might be
missing out on a particular part of a lesson, assuming that the particular software is not
directly linked to the objectives of the lesson. My recommendation is to partially plan
software use for the whole year in advance. The best work can often take days if not
weeks intermittently. For example, if the children compose stories starting from scratch at
the computer, redraft them several times, create pictures using a drawing package, insert
the pictures in appropriate places in the text, deposit the finished product in an electronic
display area or make a book for the story, then you can see that this requires sustained
work which does not conveniently fit within a short time slot. The learning and
motivation that this kind of use of computers can generate far outweighs any concerns
about missing one part of a lesson.
In addition to your planned curriculum there should always be space for spontaneity,
flexibility and creativity in relation to activities. One small part of this is the short periods
of time when lessons have reached a natural conclusion but there is, say, five minutes
before a break. You need to accumulate a ‘bag of tricks’ for these moments, sometimes
called ‘fillers’. Short, often oral activities that you can do with the children fill these
occasional gaps. There are many short games that can be enjoyable learning
opportunities. With older primary children my own preference was to adapt classic games
such as Belgian Ambassador, the yes/no game, Just a Minute, charades and so on. I could
imagine having some fun by adapting Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and The Weakest
Link if we consider current games.
Some of the most important activities for many children are extra-curricular, meaning
outside of the normal curriculum. These include a range of sporting and musical activities
or other clubs that happen during dinner hours or after school. Many teachers have found
these to be deeply rewarding experiences because they establish different kinds of
relationships with children. For example, I found that some children who were difficult
during normal lessons responded quite differently in the extra-curricular activities that I
ran. One of my more ambitious ideas involved teaching about thirty children to play
chess in time for a national chess competition!
The lesson
Having planned the curriculum you need a vehicle to deliver it; that vehicle is the lesson.
The classic lesson has an introduction (sometimes called ‘exposition’), an activity and a
conclusion. However, there are many variations on this basic format. The introduction to
the lesson usually does some or all of the following: excites the class about a new area of
learning; contextualises the learning, sometimes through anecdotes and stories; reminds
the children about previous relevant learning; explains what the objectives are; explains
new concepts; and explains what will be done for the main activity.
The main activity will have been prepared by the teacher so that it enables the children
to consolidate and extend their learning which will have been initiated in the introduction.
The main activity is also an opportunity for children to gain hands-on experience.
Sometimes the whole class may carry out the activity together but frequently it is
necessary to use smaller groups. This ensures that all children experience particular
resources that there are not enough for the whole class to use at one time. As I have
mentioned in Chapter 2 on organising the classroom, small groups also enable you to
differentiate the learning. The conclusion to the lesson will revisit the objectives to assess
the extent to which they have been achieved. Part of this may be a discussion of work that
children have been doing. If appropriate they will be encouraged to show and read from
their work. It is an opportunity to further consolidate learning, but to avoid repetition a
slightly different slant from the introduction will be taken for your input.
Before I discuss some of the many variations on this classic structure, it is worth
considering the model of lessons prescribed by the numeracy and literacy strategies. The
literacy hour consists of a half-hour introduction followed by a twenty-minute group
work section and concludes with a plenary. One of the challenges of this model is that the
introduction is rather long: thirty minutes compared to twenty minutes for the main body
of the lesson. Usually the introduction to a lesson should be no more than a quarter of the
total time available. The other challenge of the literacy hour is that the introductory
segments do not necessarily naturally lead into the group work—there is a danger that the
hour can become fragmented and lack coherence. Fortunately, national policy makers
have realised that such problems exist, and have been advising more flexibility.
The structure of the daily mathematics lesson is quite different to the literacy hour. For
a start, as you will see, they even have different names. The mathematics lesson is
introduced with a ten-minute mental maths starter. This is followed by another ten-
minute segment which is linked to the main activity of the lesson. The lesson concludes
with a ten-minute plenary. Both English and mathematics policy makers are putting
forward a model of what they consider to be best practice, yet the two models are
different. This difference at classroom level is mirrored by differences at National
Curriculum level where the Framework for Teaching for mathematics covers all the
National Curriculum requirements but the one for literacy does not, since most of the
speaking and listening requirements are covered separately.
There are many other ways to structure learning in the primary classroom. Many
people argue that teachers need to be flexible in their delivery of learning and that they
should have a range of strategies so that they can offer teaching which matches the
different learning styles of the children in the class. In the 1970s and 1980s one of the
recommended ways of working was the use of ‘carousels’ or ‘work-wheels’. The
different areas of the classroom were designated to different curriculum subjects. Thus
there would be areas for reading, writing, maths, role play, art, science and so on, and
there would also be an area which was used for a range of activities and where the
teacher would usually be located. The children would work their way from activity to
activity around the carousel. This provided structure in the sense that there was a set
pattern of activities but the children were able to decide how long to spend on a particular
activity. Some teachers used to organise blocks of time so that after a set period all
groups would rotate to a different activity.
An even more flexible system was the menu. For this, a list of activities is written on
the board or flipchart at the beginning of the week. The class know that they have to
complete them by a set time—usually Friday dinner time—and if there were not
legitimate reasons for not completing their work it would have to be done on Friday
afternoon. The benefits of this system were that you had maximum flexibility, great
scope for differentiation and real opportunities for individualised learning. The
difficulties for the teacher were the sheer numbers of activities that could be ongoing at
any one time. There were criticisms that some teachers ended up monitoring which
activities children had done, or were currently doing, more than actually teaching them.
However, the system was based on the belief that there was much learning that children
could do independently of the teacher, an idea which does not feature in recent initiatives.
Making the most of the menu system requires considerable skill and experience. The
teacher needs to form a relationship with the children, and to establish discipline and
basic classroom routines before gradually moving towards the full system. Early steps
may include a menu for just one part of a day or a limited choice of two activities to start
with. Another option is to have ‘core’ activities with a choice of follow-up activities.
My early definition of the classic lesson was a rather limited one that implied a one-
hour lesson in a classroom. Children’s learning needs to be fostered in many more ways
than this. For example, the organisation of a local walking trip can be an opportunity for a
wide range of learning. This may include preparatory work, followed by the identification
of particular features of the environment that the teacher wants to look at, and further
activities in the classroom.
Another strategy is to see learning as part of a longer process. A good example is a
‘process approach’ to the teaching of writing. Weekly ‘writing workshops’ are organised
and these can be as long as half a day. There is a process which continues from week to
week because children continue writing that has been started in a previous workshop.
When they finish one piece they go on to another one. During this kind of learning
children’s writing is at all different stages of development depending on their interests.
The teacher will regularly set up mini-lessons based on their observation of the children’s
needs. These lessons will often occur at the beginning of the workshop but they are not
obligatory.
In spite of the wide range of teaching strategies that are available, you will probably
be assessed during your training while teaching a typical one-hour classic lesson. In
addition to all the points made so far, I would add that one of the tricky areas is transition.
What happens when you move from the introduction to the main activity or from the
main activity to the conclusion? You need to know your class well and to establish
routines that enable them to efficiently move from one segment to the next. Many
teachers will call one group at a time to move from the introduction to the main activity.
As I mentioned in Chapter 2 on organising the classroom, seating arrangements and
pathways need to be clear. If the transitions are carefully thought through, you will avoid
chaos as children bump into each other and argue about the seating arrangements. This
will then be one obstacle to learning removed.
Chapter 4
Managing behaviour
Why is good discipline essential?
A well-managed and safe learning environment is an

essential prerequisite for effective teaching. If children are
distracted and not on-task then learning will not thrive. A
consistent and fair discipline strategy ensures that all
children have an equal chance to learn to their full
potential. An effective learning environment has a
purposeful atmosphere with appropriate levels of noise
depending on the kinds of activities that are taking place.
Right from the start
Consider the following scenarios:
1 Today you are going to teach your first lesson. Yesterday you had a
discussion with your class teacher who agreed what you had planned. You
arrive at school three-quarters of an hour before the start of the day and
double check that all your resources are ready. You reread your lesson
plan to make sure that it is firmly in your head. As agreed, the teacher
hands over to you and you begin your introduction. The children respond
well to your careful preparation and work hard at the activity you have
planned, even though it is a little ambitious for one hour. Occasionally
there are some behaviour problems but, because of the preparation, you
have the confidence to use appropriate strategies and redirect children to
the task in hand. Overall you are pleased with the lesson and note some
specific improvements in your evaluation.
2 Today you are going to teach your first lesson. You forgot to set the
alarm clock so arrive late looking somewhat dishevelled. You had started
to prepare some resources the day before but really needed to finish this
off today. The teacher agrees to give you a little longer to prepare. Right
at the last minute you realise that you need to check the lesson plan, but it
is too late because the teacher is ready to hand over to you. You feel
flustered and need to reread your lesson plan because you are not
absolutely clear about what you are doing. The children start to become
restless. Two of them start being silly with a ruler. You ask them to stop
what they are doing but when they see that you are getting some resources
Managing behaviour 35
out of your bag they continue messing about. You snap at them to stop
what they are doing and warn them that you will move them if it
continues. Finally the lesson begins….
Clearly Scenario 2 was a bit of a disaster! Careful planning and preparation of lessons is
one of the first steps towards effective discipline. The student in the first scenario left
nothing to chance. In consultation with the class teacher they prepared thoroughly in
advance. They arrived early so that they could double check that everything was ready.
Careful planning gave them the space and confidence to practise some behaviour
management techniques which they were able to reflect on and improve during their
training and beyond.
You will remember that in the section about attitudes to children I emphasised the
importance of forming positive relationships. Another part of the relationship will require
you to ensure that children are well behaved, and this is achieved through being ‘firm but
friendly’. When you first meet groups of children it is better to err on the side of
firmness. In a calm but determined way make them realise that you are in control. Even if
the behaviour is good in the early stages you need to be aware that as children get to
know you better there is a natural tendency for some to test the boundaries. Sometimes
effective discipline comes through calm and reasonable negotiation with children, but if
you have finally made up your mind about something you should be firm and not waver
from your decision. Imagine if you were in a PE lesson and a child was doing something
that might endanger their safety or the safety of other children. In that situation there is
no room for compromise; the child must do as they are told.
When you are on a placement your teacher will already have established routines and
the school will have a behaviour management policy, so you will need to ensure that
these are continued. One aspect of this policy will be about what children do when they
first arrive at school. In the early years (and for all year groups in some schools) children
come straight to the classroom when they arrive at school. There are natural opportunities
to talk to parents which do not exist with older children. If teachers and the parents of a
child are seen to be working together this is a great help in supporting good behaviour.
Many schools make children line up in the playground when the bell or whistle goes to
indicate that it is time to come in. Make sure that the children are standing still and quiet.
Your body language can help here. Stand tall and watch the line carefully. If any children
are not concentrating on this, walk up to them and remind them of the behaviour that you
expect. Do not be afraid to wait until you have the behaviour that you expect. Once this
has been achieved, do not linger any longer than you have to; nobody likes standing in
the cold unnecessarily!
One of the first things most children do when they come into school is to take off their
coats and put their belongings such as lunch boxes somewhere. It is amazing how much
fun children can make out of these seemingly straightforward jobs. This fun can also lead
to poor behaviour, so you need to have done everything possible to minimise disruption.
Coat hooks with children’s names on them are helpful in preventing arguments over
where the coats should go. For the youngest children these are often accompanied by a
colourful picture to aid identification for beginning readers. The next priority is a clear
system for the children’s belongings. Some cloakrooms have enough space for these; at
other times they need a designated place in the classroom.
It is advisable for the children to have something to do while you take the register.
Some classrooms have a carpeted reading area which means that the children can come in
and select a book to read. Early years children may be encouraged to engage in a range of
activities straight away or perhaps share books in the reading area. Older children may be
reading a longer text which is kept in their personal drawer. This can be conveniently
read at their desk. Some teachers prefer to write down a short activity on the board which
the children do as soon as they come in. This can be very useful for the regular
development of basic skills.
People often talk about the ‘presence’ some teachers have. When you watch these
teachers the children seem to behave naturally for them most of the time. It is their
experience that helps them to achieve good behaviour. In particular they have learned to
anticipate potential problems. This means that the opportunities for inappropriate
behaviour rarely exist. One of the ways this presence can be established is through body
language, in particular the use of the voice, the face and the eyes. For much of the time
one of your strategies for rewarding children is to smile and to say something positive to
them. Conversely, if they are behaving inappropriately then your face will register
displeasure. Quite often a long look in their direction is enough to pre-empt inappropriate
behaviour.
The ability to anticipate potential problems also comes through the phenomenon of
teachers with ‘eyes in the back of the head’. Many people have claimed that most
teachers have this special gift but nobody has ever found physical proof. In truth it would
probably be more accurate to say ‘ears in the back of the head’. It is amazing how
different sounds can alert you to things that should not be happening; ironically, very
quiet moments can be a sign that something is amiss. You occasionally hear parents say
‘It’s too quiet, something must be wrong’, only to find their toddler demolishing the
biscuit jar. The important thing is to keep an eye on the whole classroom at all times,
even when working intensively with a small group. Always try and sit so that you have a
view of the whole classroom. Line of vision is especially important for your observation
of PE lessons so that you can monitor potentially dangerous activities.
You will remember that in the section on your attitudes to children I mentioned the
rule of thumb about ‘four positives to one negative’. Being positive is one of your most
powerful weapons in managing discipline. Positive feedback gives children a reason for
behaving well. You need to keep up the positive feedback even for the things which
might seem rather mundane: ‘Well done Jamie, I liked the way you came in there….
Good girl Sarah, you reminded Eve to hang her coat up…. Aren’t you being quiet
Andrew, well done!’
Just as it is essential to establish discipline right from the start it is also important to
conclude sessions on a high note. If you do this, the beginning of the next session or day
will be that much easier. With many classes, once you have established the routines,
children can be trusted to file out in an orderly way. However, this trust needs to be
established, since complete chaos can ensue, with other classes all rushing to the bottle-
neck doorway, crushing helpless victims as they go. Classes can vary on a daily basis as
well. The most difficult days are when it has been raining and they have not had a chance
to go outside—this often leads to excitable and restless children. So, in the early stages
and on difficult days, you may have to let one group go out at a time. This is often done
as a reward so that the group that has been working best might get to go out first.
Sometimes it can be quite good to encourage children to answer a quick question before
they go out—for example, a mathematical computation or a spelling question.
Using your voice
I have talked about the importance of body language and non-verbal signals in relation to
your presence in the classroom. One of the most important attributes that I have not
mentioned yet is the use of the voice. Most actions in the classroom are indicated by
speech. It is no surprise that many teachers have reflected on the extent to which they
almost become actors, with the classroom as their stage. Think about some of the
different roles you take on, all of which require subtle differences in the voice: telling a
story with passion and drama; asking learning questions; registering your disapproval;
talking quietly to one child; making yourself heard across the playground and so on.
One of the problems with a job that requires so much use of the voice is that if your
voice goes you cannot do your job. For this reason you need to look after it. Professional
actors and singers go to significant lengths to learn how to use the voice, and to ensure
that it remains in good shape. One important feature of their training is the way they are
taught to ‘support’ the voice. Support is provided by use of the diaphragm and the
stomach muscles. Much of voice technique comes through mental imagery, since you
cannot see the larynx and diaphragm. In simple terms it is recommended that you
imagine that the start of an utterance comes from the diaphragm. The neck should not be
strained and your eye-line should be level rather than looking upward, as this can strain
the vocal chords. In order to achieve the necessary volume without straining yourself, it is
important to imagine the voice coming from the bottom of your lungs, which enables you
to produce a slightly lower pitch and a more powerful sound. The other important thing is
to drink plenty of water; there is nothing wrong with keeping a bottle in your classroom.
No matter how strong your voice, it will be damaged if you have to do a lot of
shouting. You should never shout at children in anger. Teaching is a stressful job at times
and children can try your patience, but shouting is not the answer. Some young children
visibly shake at a loud shout and this should be enough to teach us that shouting is
inappropriate. However, it is quite natural that at times you will need to raise your voice.
The guideline is that the level of the voice should be just enough for all the children to
hear and no more. Another useful strategy is to quickly rehearse in your mind the reasons
for raising your voice. Delaying to think for a split second can ensure you are that much
more in control before you get the children’s attention. This is like the old rule about
counting to ten if you are angry.
Levels of noise are an important factor in classrooms. Assumptions are often made
that a noisy class is one that is not on-task or that the teacher is not properly in control.
There is a point when most people would agree that the noise levels are so high that the
children’s work suffers; however, there are a range of factors that contribute to noise
levels. It would be technically possible to make older children work in silence all day.
They could be set individual tasks which they would have to work on alone. There would
be no interaction with their peers. The teacher would only talk to them if absolutely
necessary. Now this would be a quiet classroom but it would certainly not be a productive
learning environment. The point I am making is that noise is very much connected with
the kinds of activities the children are doing. Probably the noisiest day in the school
calendar is sports day or a swimming gala, where children are cheering on their
classmates. If children are encouraged to compose music using a range of percussion
instruments then clearly there will be high levels of sound at times. If you set up
collaborative talk-based activities as part of your speaking and listening work then once
again the noise levels will be higher than if the children are doing a spelling test.
The structure of whole class teaching makes the control of noise more straightforward.
If you insist that children raise their hand if they wish to talk, and that only one person
talks at once, then noise levels are naturally low. Perhaps the most difficult time is when
children are engaged in a range of group activities. At these times you will need to
monitor what you think is an appropriate level of noise in your classroom. The children
may need reminding frequently and persistently at times. However, it is often the case
that most of the class is talking at a reasonable level but some individual children are too
noisy. These children will require advice on acceptable ways to talk. You should aim for
a level of noise that is comfortable for you and the children in the class and that is a
product of enthusiastic work.
When talking to children as a whole class it is important to maintain varied intonation.
If you want people to listen to you then a dull monotone is not going to work. The use of
varied intonation is particularly pertinent to story-telling, but it also comes into lesson
introductions. One of your skills is to try to win the children’s attention as you introduce
them to a new activity. I once saw a student teacher begin a maths lesson like this:
Do you know what happened to me last night? Well, my friend and I who
live together had run out of food so we decided to order a pizza. At first
we couldn’t decide what to have but eventually we ordered the vegetarian
chilli special. My friend said that we could have half each. When the pizza
arrived my friend started to cut the pizza into four pieces.
I said ‘What ya doing?’
‘Cutting the pizza into four pieces so that we can have two quarters
each.’
‘But you said that I could have half…that’s not fair!’
The teacher then asked the children if the friend was being fair. I’m sure you have
worked out the main mathematical focus of the lesson. What was wonderful about this
introduction was that the student used her excellent story-telling skills to contextualise an
abstract subject in the children’s daily lives. The lively way in which she told the story—
including her varied intonation—had the children gripped.
Approaches to discipline
I have spoken about some basic techniques and strategies for managing discipline, but if
these are to work they have to be under-pinned by sound policies and theories. An
example of a theory in this area is that you should separate the behaviour from the child.
If you need to tell a child off, then phrases such as ‘You are always naughty’ imply that
the child is intrinsically naughty and that this is unalterable. This directly opposes the
view that we regard all children positively. In order to separate the behaviour from the
child it is important to be specific about the behaviour by saying things like ‘I’m not
happy that you broke our rule about hurting other people’ or ‘Why did you break that
pencil?’ or ‘Please don’t talk when someone else is talking because we can’t hear what
they are saying’.
One practical approach that has been popular in schools is called assertive discipline.
Assertive discipline is built on the idea that the management of behaviour is built on three
concepts: rules, rewards and sanctions. In order to make the system work children need to
be involved as much as possible right from the start. One way of agreeing rules is to
brainstorm all the rules that the children think there should be. The ideas they come up
with then need to be grouped together in no more than five groups. The idea is that you
come up with four or five main rules which cover most things in the school. The main
reason for this is to keep them memorable and simple. For example, you might end up
with the following:
1 We work hard and learn as much as possible.
2 We are kind to other people.
3 We do what is asked the first time.
4 We listen to what other people say.
5 We look after things in the school.
You will notice that the rules are expressed as positive statements of intent rather than
negative indications of what the children should not do.
Once the rules have been established you need to brainstorm the kinds of rewards that
might be offered. The rewards are offered as whole class rewards because the intention is
to get the class to work together as a team to create a positive learning environment.
Teachers put ticks on a chart or marbles in a jar on a daily basis. Once the chart has
reached an agreed limit then a whole class reward is offered. The children can come up
with all kinds of rewards but there are of course practical limits: an extended play-time,
an extra games period, a video, a wear-your-own-clothes day, an extra trip, are all
examples. I remember that on one occasion we had been studying ancient Greece, so I
decided to bring in some Greek foods as a reward. At the end of a day we all sat in the
carpet area and enjoyed taramasalata, houmous and pitta bread.
One of the important things about effective discipline is consistency. Children want to
behave well but it is difficult for them if the rules keep changing or if the sanctions vary
from occasion to occasion. Having established agreed rules and the concept of rewards, it
is important that the sanctions are clear. If they break one of the rules, children are
usually given one warning before their name is noted. Some people argue that it is better
not to write names on the blackboard as occasionally children might see it as a game to
get their name on the board as many times as possible.
If the child’s name is noted more than once then a set series of sanctions begins to
apply. A typical list might be as follows:
1 Moved to another location in the classroom.
2 Detained for five minutes during a break.
3 Detained for a full break.
4 Moved to another class for a set period.
5 Sent to headteacher.
6 Parents informed.
These kinds of behaviour management systems work best if they are agreed by the whole
school so that the children see them being consistently applied throughout the school. It is
also important to have whole school agreement because some of the sanctions, such as
being sent to another class or to the headteacher, need to be properly coordinated if they
are to be effective.
The main role of discipline systems is to avoid conflict. There are many things
teachers do before they even have to apply sanctions. Assuming that they have built up a
positive relationship with the children, that their activities are interesting and well
planned, and that they have developed the skills and experience to anticipate potential
trouble before it happens, they will also have strategies for resolving conflict quickly.
One of the best of these is humour. If a situation is beginning to involve disagreement
and conflict, teachers will often appeal to children’s sense of humour to distract them
from inappropriate behaviour. Distraction is a particularly good ploy with young children
and often involves drawing their attention to something different. However, if children
have an important grievance then they have the right to be listened to.
One of the occasions when there are often problems to sort out is after break-times.
The more relaxed rules of the playground often result in some children disagreeing and
fighting over various things. When they come in from the playground they may feel that
this has not been properly dealt with by the adult who was supervising the break. In the
resolution of any dispute it is vital that you are fair to all sides. It is a natural human
tendency to form views about the children in your class and for these views to become
expectations of behaviour. However, the discipline in your class will be better if you are
seen to be fair. The model of the court-room has some resonance with this. The first thing
you need to do is to hear both sides of the argument: the case for the prosecution and the
case for the defence. You may need to ask other children who were nearby, or involved,
what they saw: calling witnesses. Having heard the evidence you will need to make a
decision on what will happen next: judge and jury. Sometimes the very fact that you have
gone through this process may mean that the heat has been taken out of the moment and
the children asked to forget what has happened. At other times it may be that something
serious has happened, such as unpleasant name calling or physical violence, in which
case you will have to apply a sanction: sentencing. Some cases are so serious that the
early sanctions in the list are inappropriate and it may be that the head needs to be
involved straight away.
Sometimes problems between children become persistent and may turn into bullying.
All schools will have bullying from time to time. You have a duty to do everything in
your power to stop children being bullied. Bullying does not have to involve physical
violence; psychological bullying can be just as dangerous. Bullying basically involves an
abuse of power where a psychologically stronger (and often physically stronger) child
abuses a weaker one. It may be argued that even one occurrence of such behaviour is
bullying, but the more serious cases are where the bullying is repetitious and persistent.
The long periods of contact that you have with your class and the opportunity to build
relationships means that you are in a good position to be sensitive to bullying behaviour.
Having said that, one of the classic traits of people who are bullied is that they often feel
unable to share their problems with someone else. Their mind may be locked into a
feeling of helplessness. Thus when you deal with conflict situations you need to mentally
check if the parties have been involved before. You also need to be vigilant during break-
times and at home-time to make sure that bullying is not taking place. If you suspect that
it is, you need to deal with it efficiently and promptly. It is often a good idea to take
advice from the headteacher.
Schools need well-organised policies in order to be successful in dealing with
bullying. Part of these policies may include recognition that there are steps you can take
to reduce the likelihood of bullying happening in the first place. One of these steps is to
give the children in your class clear advice about what to do if someone threatens them.
Assertiveness is important in these situations, so children need to be taught to say things
like ‘Stop doing that, I don’t like it’ and to walk away from the aggressor. Other
strategies may include reading texts that illustrate the emotions which both bullies and
bullied may feel. These texts can be used along with other ideas as part of the focus for
discussion during circle times.
I have discussed pupil-against-pupil violence but so far have not touched on the
possibility of violence against teachers. It is very difficult to know whether or not
violence against teachers is increasing. It has been suggested that the laudable
governmental aim of integrating more children into mainstream schools may have
resulted in an increase in the number of children with serious behavioural difficulties.
Part of the problem is the fact that over the past few years the media have focused on this
issue more and more. To a certain extent this has been because the teaching unions have
been registering their concern more strongly about incidents of violence. It is always very
difficult to separate evidence from media hype. You can compare this with the arguments
about crime statistics. For example, many parents feel less confident about allowing their
children out on their own, and this may have contributed to the rise in people driving
their children to school. But when you look at the statistics for child abduction or murder
they have remained relatively static for a number of years.
Unfortunately there are some teachers who have been attacked by pupils. The likely
outcome for such a circumstance would be the suspension or expulsion of the child, and,
if the attack is serious enough, criminal charges may follow. Fortunately, the vast
majority of teachers do not experience violence against them by pupils, although the
likelihood of experiencing threatening behaviour may by higher. In addition to the
behaviour management strategies that are discussed in this chapter, it is worth reminding
yourself of the importance of forming positive professional relationships with children,
an issue covered in Chapter 1. Genuine respect, persistent positive rewards for
appropriate behaviour and the avoidance of blame where possible usually go a long way
to ensuring that children respond appropriately.
Supporting children with persistent challenging behaviour
Really clear systems and experience will take you a long way towards achieving effective
discipline, but there will usually be one or two children (sometimes more) who have quite
serious behavioural problems. These problems are often complex and such children are
unlikely to respond to short-term measures alone. They require you to have a long-term
view of how you might modify the child’s behaviour.
The first thing that you have to do is to work out what makes the child ‘tick’. This
requires regular relaxed and positive interaction where you both get to know each other.
Often these children suffer from very low self-esteem, so positive feedback is even more
important than usual. Take the opportunity to talk to the child if you are on playground
duty and at other informal moments during the day.
Although the normal rules, rewards and sanctions will apply, you may find that you
need to make space to talk at greater length with these children. Keeping them behind at
playtime may be one of your sanctions but you can use these times to counsel the child. It
may well be necessary to arrange neutral non-punishment sessions to talk to the child so
that you can make a separation between sanctions and support.
Counsellors sometimes describe sessions as going through recognisable stages. The
‘initiating’ stage is part of the relationshipbuilding process. One of the features of this is
the actual area where you meet and how seating is arranged. The teacher sitting at a desk
with the child in front is clearly rather confrontational and is unlikely to lead to
productive dialogue. Far better is to sit with the child at their level, possibly at one of the
classroom tables. The listening skills that we described in the section on skills of
interaction will be important here.
The ‘exploration’ stage involves you achieving a stronger understanding of the
problems the child faces. To show that you understand, you paraphrase and ‘replay’
(using the same words where possible) some of the issues that the child has addressed.
This stage also involves you focusing the child on the specific problem at hand. The
‘understanding’ stage is designed to encourage the child to think about possible options
which might help them address the problem. Their options will often have both positive
and negative aspects which the child needs to reflect on. The ‘action’ stage is all about
moving towards change, encouraging the child to take control and planning to improve
the situation. Finally, the session is often brought to an appropriate close by reassuring
the child that you will make time available for them should they need to talk.
Another strategy that can help you to understand challenging behaviour is to note the
context before and after the inappropriate behaviour. This is sometimes called the ABC
of behaviour management. A are the antecedents of the behaviour. What particular
circumstances led to the behaviour? Was it through disagreement with another child?
Was it at a particular time of day? Was it during a particular activity? B is the behaviour
itself. What exactly was the child’s behaviour like? Their body language, the things they
said, their facial expression? Calm reflection on this can help you to place the behaviour
into a realistic context. C is the consequence of the behaviour. What was your action after
the behaviour and how did the child respond? The interesting point about this system is
that it allows you to realise that behaviour is often part of a relationship between a teacher
and a child. In order to change children’s behaviour you may have to reflect on your own
and change that as well.
When a child exhibits particularly challenging behaviour, part of the strategy will
require working with parents. There is often a link between the home environment and
behaviour at school but these links are never straightforward. I remember a child called
Trevor when I was teaching in London. He had a skinhead haircut in the days when this
was a style often linked with racist political groups. Trevor would walk into the class first
thing in the morning in a way that said to the other children ‘I’m the boss’. His behaviour
was difficult, not so much in class but particularly in the playground where he could be
quite violent. I met his parents one day after school and the subject turned to his
behaviour. I explained that he quite often got into fights. In the course of the conversation
I learned that dad’s advice to Trevor was that if someone crossed him he should beat
them up. This was of course in direct opposition to the school’s approach which was to
recommend that children should tell a teacher on duty rather than take the law into their
own hands. I was able to explain this to Trevor’s parents, and to their credit they took the
matter seriously, and over time Trevor’s behaviour did start to improve.
At another school, Aron was not a violent child but he could be very disruptive in
class. He seemed to be confident on the outside but his constant need to play the fool
during whole class discussions hinted at low self-esteem. He would often arrive at school
some three-quarters of an hour before lessons began and wait in the playground, even
though he was allowed to come in. I decided to speak to his mother about his behaviour.
She told me that he was no trouble at all at home so found it difficult to understand the
difficulties that we were facing at school. We met on a number of occasions but by the
time the child left my class I still did not feel that I had got to fully understand his
behaviour, which made me realise how complex some children are.
The strategies that have been discussed so far are all ones that will need to be tried
before a child is given a ‘statement of special educational needs’. There is a detailed
process which must be followed if you feel that a child has identifiable and serious
special needs. These may be physical, behavioural, or related to difficulties with
particular areas of the curriculum. There are various stages the school must go through on
the way to making a statement of special educational needs. The early stages consist of
careful recording of the child’s behaviour and action taken using the available resources
(human and physical) of the school. Parents will always be involved, and it may be
necessary to involve an educational psychologist and/or other agencies. Following this
usually lengthy process a statement may be agreed, with the implication that extra
funding must be allocated by the Local Education Authority (LEA) to that child. In
severe cases this may mean that a full-time assistant is allocated to the child to support
them during school hours. Clearly this is an expensive outcome, and LEAs have to be
convinced that the money is being appropriately spent and that this will meet the child’s
needs.
Chapter 5
Assessing and record keeping
What can assessment tell you about your children?
A part of the teacher’s job involves making judgements

about children. It is important that these judgements are
based on valid evidence, not just gut feeling. Such
evidence is gathered through your assessments of the
children in your class. Assessments help you to plan for
future learning and indicate how much you and the
children have achieved.
Observing, listening and offering feedback
One of the most important assessment skills is the ability to be a perceptive and sensitive
observer of children at work; an American educator memorably called this ‘kid
watching’. However, before you start observing children it is important that you know
what you are looking for. This is why a knowledge of child development is important.
Knowledge about development is acquired every time you work with a group of children.
You may have noticed things about children’s development during any pre-course
experience you have had. This knowledge will be added to on your course as you discuss
aspects of development in the different subject areas and gain wider experience working
with children.
Part of these skills is the ability to recognise what has been achieved before thinking
about what is likely to be achieved next. At the beginning of the year an important part of
this includes discussions with the previous teacher who will have built up considerable
knowledge of the children you are about to teach. But whatever you do in practice—to
learn about the children in your class—will be related to your theories about children and
their learning.
I remember when I was an inexperienced teacher reading about some researchers who
had worked with 3-year-old children in a nursery. They were looking at literacy
development. One of the points they made—and this was common to many nurseries at
the time—was that adults tended to underestimate the children’s achievements. The
researchers came across a girl called Latrice and at first found it very difficult to identify
the positive aspects of her development. Like the other children, she was asked to do
some drawing and writing of her choice. To the untrained observer her work would have
been described as ‘scribble’, with no discernible difference between the writing and the
drawing. However, the researchers discovered, by talking to Latrice while she was
working, that there were in fact a number of signs of development. She knew how to hold
the pencil, she knew that the paper was for writing on, she had a clear idea that drawing
was different to writing and her marks reflected this, she used space to indicate different
meanings, she would switch from drawing to writing to buy herself time to think. If you
hold on to your philosophy that children are logical and eager to learn, then no matter
how young they are you just need to keep searching for their achievements. This is
important because it means your expectations will not be too low when you support their
learning.
In order to become good at assessing children through observation you have to learn to
make time and prioritise. If you believe that the most important thing is for you to be
actively teaching all of the time then you will not be able to observe. Detailed
observation requires you to make some time to sit back and watch children at work. This
does not need to be for long periods of time: it is amazing how long a minute can seem
when you engage in this kind of assessment. When this observation informs your
practical action there is a much better fit between your teaching and the children’s
learning needs. In early years settings the team decides on their assessment strategies,
including who is carrying out the assessment at a particular time. Close contact with
parents also adds to the teacher’s understanding of the children in their class.
You will have picked up that assessment is not just about statutory tests (sometimes
called SATs or Standard Assessment Tasks), exams, targets and so on. It is partially
about the day-to-day contact you have with your children. If you develop a state of mind
where you are ultra-cautious about negative assumptions and one in which you rigorously
search for objective evidence about your children, you will be some way along the
assessment road.
Having carefully assessed your children through observation and interaction you will
offer them a range of feedback. In the section on attitudes to children I outlined the
importance of specific positive feedback. This is often oral, but another day-to-day task
which is an important assessment opportunity is written marking.
Marking is one of the great traditions of being a teacher. Because it is a tradition, it is
one of those things about which many assumptions are made. The first assumption that is
sometimes made is that teachers have the time to mark every single piece of work in
minute detail. Some simple figures show that this is ridiculous. Let us say that you spend
five minutes marking each piece of work. Each child in a class could comfortably carry
out four pieces of work per day. If you multiply that by thirty-five children, that is 140
pieces of work. In one week that is 700 pieces of work which would take fifty-eight hours
to mark! This means that in reality you will need to sample the children’s work.
One of the checks you will want to do regularly is that children have attempted and
completed the activities. You might use a tick to indicate that you have checked this but
not looked at it in detail. Decisions to make a more detailed examination should be based
on the range of particular kinds of work that you want to see. On these occasions a
longhand written comment is more appropriate than a ‘good’, a smiley face or a star.
Written comments should start with a specific positive statement about the work and then
move on to something that the child might improve on. For example: ‘I liked your
diagram of the circuit, it was really detailed and included all the things that you used.
Don’t forget to label the different objects next time.’ Having gone to the trouble to write
comments like this you will want to make sure that children read them. You can check
this out with them when you next work along-side by asking them if they remembered
Assessing and record keeping 47
and understood the comments. Photocopies of work that you choose to sample
accompanied by your written comments can be added to a portfolio which gives a picture
of the child’s development.
Types of assessment
There are two main types of assessment: formative and summative. The other type of
assessment, called diagnostic, is really another kind of formative assessment.
Assessments which directly support the teaching and learning process are formative and
are usually carried out at the time of teaching. These include the observation and
interaction that we described at the start of this chapter. Summative assessments are used
more for reasons of accountability and tend to be a one-off at the end of a unit of work.
Summative assessment usually involves the collation of results for other people. These
results are used to make judgements about the progress of pupils, teachers and schools.
Diagnostic assessment involves a greater depth of analysis and is usually related to the
learning of individuals.
The most high-profile summative assessments in the primary school are the statutory
tests at ages 7 and 11 (year 2 and year 6). These are used to make judgements about
schools’ progress during the year and the progress of schools nationally over a number of
years. These tests have been the subject of heated and acrimonious debate and will
continue to be so; however, for the purposes of this book they provide an appropriate
example of summative assessment. To give an example of what the children do for the
tests, the following is taken from the KS1 (Key Stage 1—Reception to year 2) tests for
2000.
Example task:
Letter from Blink
Children use the story ‘Fly by Night’ and write a letter from Blink, the
baby owl, describing his flight.
Example task:
Weather and Us
Children use the format of the book Wind and Us to produce a piece of
information/explanation writing about another aspect of the weather and
its effect upon our lives.
Once the child has carried out the writing the teacher then has to decide which of the
‘Performance descriptions for levels 1 to 3’ best describes the child’s attainment. The
tasks/tests at KS1 are assessed by the teacher. Although teacher assessment is still a
feature of the tests at KS2 (year 3 to year 6) the external marking is given much higher
priority.
If you take summative and formative assessment as your two main categories there are
a range of assessment strategies that you might use. Arguably one of the most important
yet underused strategies is self-assessment. This is where children are encouraged to
reflect on their own achievements. At an informal level questions such as ‘What did you
do best in this activity?’, ‘Do you understand this?’, ‘Which bit do you find difficult?’,
‘What do you think needs improving?’, are all ways of encouraging children to reflect on
their own learning. This kind of reflection can be made more formal if required. For
example, some teachers include a written self-evaluation within assessments that are done
at the end of a unit of work.
Speaking and listening work offers good opportunities for pupil self-assessment.
Imagine that you have set up some collaborative group work. The group of four children
are planning a presentation on an aspect of their history work. You have recommended
some topic areas and they have selected one they are interested in. The children have
found various pieces of information by starting with a’Horrible History’ book and then
comparing this with information from other books and the Internet. At this point you
encourage the children to step back and think about certain issues; for example, have they
repeated any information? Are they sure it is accurate? Will their audience be interested?
The presentation is supported by posters which members of the group design. The
children rehearse their presentation and record a video, which gives another opportunity
for a high level of self-assessment based on a series of questions that you have asked
them to think about. The use of video and audio tapes can be a very effective way of
encouraging self-assessment and reflection.
I have discussed informal observations as an important assessment strategy, and these
can be made more formal by narrowing the focus. Informal observations tend to rely on
your general skills as an observer of child development whereas more formal
observations will often have a predetermined focus. You will have thought about the
specific things you are looking for. For example, a maths observation might look for the
child’s understanding that mathematical addition is associative or that they know all their
number bonds.
Sometimes you will want to design an activity that will enable you to assess the
children’s understanding in a specific area. These assessment activities are usually
accompanied by a record-keeping pro forma (see Figure 5.1) that you design, which
enables you to ensure that your assessment is rooted in the work you are doing in the
classroom and is very closely related to their observed needs.
Record keeping is the practice of keeping written records about children’s
achievements which inform your assessments. There are many kinds of record-keeping
formats which vary in focus and structure. One of the most well-used and useful formats
is the record book. This is a notebook which has a page for each child. Any significant
aspects of learning are noted. As time goes by this will enable you to build a rich picture
of the children’s achievements. There are often children for whom you have many
comments while for others very few. This simple check on the number of comments can
help you to ensure that you are allocating your time fairly to different children. Some
teachers prefer to be more systematic about this and choose named children to focus on
over a set period of time.
Figure 5.1 Record-keeping pro forma for assessment activity

Checklists are also a common record-keeping format. The advantage of a checklist or
ticklist is that you can make a quick assessment of the children’s progress in a specific
area. For example, you might record if all the children understood the concept of musical
pitch by observing and talking to them during a music session, or you might record
whether they can do a forward roll in PE. The disadvantage of checklists is that they offer
only a small amount of assessment information in rather specific areas.
One of the important things to bear in mind is that the assessments you do should be
genuinely useful. Most of the time they are used to inform your teaching. This should be
a natural process where the perceptive teacher who works closely with the children in
their class rigorously reflects on the lessons and plans future lessons based on that
reflection. Some teachers like to jot down notes on their planning to remind them of ideas
that they want to revisit. More formal assessments are used to check that your informal
judgements are accurate which sometimes leads to unexpected out-comes. For example,
it can be quite exciting to discover that a child about whom you had particular beliefs
exceeds your expectations.
One of the other important uses of assessment is when you communicate children’s
progress at parents’ evenings and in reports. It is very easy for reports to become rather
bland statements that seem to relate more to external considerations than a reflection of
an individual child’s progress. One of the ways to individualise comments is to use your
observations collected over time to characterise the report. The report may be seen not
only as a judgement but also as another learning experience. Strong illustrative examples
of successful work done by the child will be discussed at home, giving the opportunity to
remember this previous learning and to consolidate it. In more basic terms it is also much
more interesting to read real observations rather than bland general statements.
Managing assessment
‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ is a tale that relates well to many educational initiatives.
Too often teachers have gone along with unworkable ideas from politicians, covered up
cracks and made things look as though they work. Assessment is a case in point. The
primary curriculum has many subjects, all of which could in theory be covered by very
detailed assessment procedures. However, if you tried to do this you would end up with
very little life outside your work and probably a nervous breakdown!
The overriding concern should be for a high quality of assessment rather than a large
quantity of assessments. People sometimes suggest that it is possible to assess every
lesson that you teach. Given that assessment by observation and interaction is a feature of
every lesson then it is true that every lesson is assessed. The problem comes when people
then suggest that you should have written records for these assessments. It is not realistic
to have written assessments for every lesson; even the simple checklist which is a quick
option offers only superficial judgements.
The more sensible approach is to think about assessment over the whole term and/or
year. To a certain extent this decision may be influenced by whole school factors. Target
setting is a feature of all classrooms these days. In order to qualify for higher salary
payments and to satisfy local authority demands for information, teachers are required to
assess their pupils, often using statistical packages, in order to show that there has been
progress. Nursery departments are required to undertake ‘baseline’ assessments very
early in the child’s educational life. SATs are undertaken nationally at age 7 and 11.
Annual reports have to be written and have to include certain information about National
Curriculum levels. All these whole school demands impact on the teacher’s overall time
for assessment. Once you have found out about whole school requirements you will be in
a better position to plan for the other kinds of assessments you will do in your class.
The requirements of different subjects influence the nature of assessments. English
and maths have traditionally attracted the most record keeping, although there have been
significant differences between them. As a reflection of the general importance of ‘texts’
and contextualised language for English teaching, much high-quality English assessment
has used formats that require the writing of longhand observations and reflections. In
part, this has been because the factors that make up the learning of English are not a
simple set of skills. Take writing as an example: people who are strong writers have a
good sense of audience and purpose for their writing. They compose texts which suit the
context, which include appropriate ideas and which are clearly readable. If we take the
sense of audience as but one example of many, it is very difficult to assess a child by
giving their attainment a numeric value or an indication on a checklist that a skill has
been acquired.
Maths has traditionally involved greater use of checklists of skills, but even for this
subject it is questionable as to whether mathematical learning is really such a simple
linear progression of knowledge. When you are next in school, try to keep detailed
observations of the progress of one child’s mathematics. You will quickly see that there
are myriad factors that influence mathematical development, and that definitive
judgements are tricky to make.
Science has often involved various approaches. Some science work is covered in
discrete units such as work on the planets. In this respect it is akin to certain aspects of
history and geography work. On some occasions the children cover this work only once
in their primary school careers, so teachers have adopted end-of-unit assessments. An
arguably more important part of science work is the investigation side. For this work,
children will reveal investigative skills over a range of different activities. Teachers have
made use of lists of investigative knowledge and understanding which they have assessed
as children carry out the activities.
So far we have mentioned only the core subjects. Music has often been a subject in
danger of not being taught at all by classroom teachers and is often given to a specialist
music teacher. Although some teachers lack confidence, it has been successfully argued
for many years that an appreciation of music and an awareness of some basic approaches
are enough to offer all children some worth-while musical experiences. Even if teachers
approached music in this way, the added responsibility of assessing children’s musical
development may well seem to be a burden to many. Perhaps with a subject like music it
is necessary to think about less frequent assessments and to consider opportunities
throughout the child’s whole primary school career.
PE is in a similar position. Part of the problem with PE teaching is that the teacher
should be quite active in lessons. As a motivator they need to do some demonstrating.
They may need to physically support children from time to time. They need to have sharp
eyes to watch out for safety. If you are doing all these things it is difficult, if not
dangerous, to carry out any record keeping at the time. Records maintained after lessons
are one option, but as time elapses so does the memory of the small details that can help
you make assessment judgements.
ICT actually lends itself well to simple diagnostic on-screen tests, although these have
many limitations. The other advantage is that work can be saved on disk and viewed at a
later date, although to ignore the process that led to the work is to miss a very important
part of the picture. Did I mention RE, art and design, design and technology…?
As you can see, assessment is a tricky business in primary classrooms. Overall I return
to the advice that I put forward at the beginning. Make sure that the assessment you do is
of a high quality and that it results in better future learning for the children. Plan carefully
to ensure that the assessments you do are manageable.
Chapter 6
Thinking about education
Is primary teaching all practice and no theory?
Some people argue that learning to teach requires

straightforward training: learn the skills and you can do the
job. If this is true then there is no need for any theory, or
philosophies. But you only have to be in the company of
enthusiastic, committed, idealistic, experienced teachers
for a short time to realise that it is impossible to think
about educational practice without theory. When there is a
lack of specific reliable evidence to guide you on how to
act, then theories can help efficient decision making.
Issues
One of the exciting things about being a teacher is that most people in society are
interested in education. Parents want the best for their children, adults want to ensure that
they get the best from their lifelong learning, employers want employees who have the
skills that they need, politicians want control. This is not a new phenomenon, since
society has had an interest in education for thousands of years:
What is this education to be, then? Perhaps we shall hardly invent a

system better than the one which long experience has worked out, with its
two branches for the cultivation of the mind and of the body. And I
suppose we shall begin with the mind, before we start physical training.
Naturally.
Under that head will come stories (in a wide sense including poetry and
prose); and of these there are two kinds: some are true, others fictitious.
Both must come in, but we shall begin our education with the fictitious
kind.
These were some of the thoughts of the philosopher Plato c 400 BC. A knowledge of
history is a very powerful weapon to help you better understand the present and to make
informed projections about the future. This historical knowledge links very closely with a
number of recurring educational issues.
The period since 1988—exacerbated since 1997—features unique and overwhelming
state control of teachers’ jobs. State intervention in education began in 1802 with a law
called the Health and Morals of Apprentices Bill. The development of the law was led by
the cotton manufacturer Sir Robert Peel. The motivation for this bill was quite different
from recent state intervention: Peel was motivated primarily by compassion and interest
in children and not directly by economic success. Children who worked in the factories
faced appalling conditions. This was the first ‘factory act’, and it contained the
requirement that some part of the working day should include instruction in the three ‘R’s
(reading, writing and arithmetic), and religious teaching on a Sunday.
The next significant landmark was the 1870 Education Act: this was the first education
act established in England. The act was a compromise because it missed the opportunity
to create a new national system of education. It still allowed for a distinction between
voluntary schooling and schooling that required the payment of fees. The act set up two
kinds of voluntary schools which still exist today: those provided by local authorities
(which at the time were called ‘school boards’) which are paid for by the state; and the
church schools or denominational schools funded partly by endowments from the church
and partly by the state.
In 1988 a new law, the Education Reform Act, heralded the end of an ERA (which is
its nickname!). The act put unprecedented powers into the hands of secretaries of state for
education. For the first time since the beginning of the twentieth century, government
was able to prescribe the teaching and learning in primary schools by introducing a
National Curriculum. Although strong arguments were put forward about children’s
‘entitlement’ to a National Curriculum and that there was a need for a more coherent
structure to the primary curriculum, the majority of respondents to the consultation were
negative (as the book Take Care, Mr Baker! (Haviland 1988) memorably showed). In
spite of this opposition the National Curriculum became a statutory requirement. We are
now into the third version of the National Curriculum since 1988, yet there are some
(such as the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce
(RSA)) who persuasively argue that the current version is unfortunately more suited to
Victorian times than a curriculum that is right for the twenty-first century and beyond.
The increasing control of teachers’ jobs has most recently been extended by the
establishment of the literacy and numeracy strategies which prescribe not only the
content but also the teaching methods that should be employed.
Equal opportunity is a major issue for society in general, but it also has particular
relevance for education. One of the fundamental features of the education system is that it
tries to give equal opportunities to all children so that they can achieve their aspirations.
For this reason there has been intense debate about how to achieve this. Equal
opportunities are frequently related to social categories such as race, gender and class. It
is often claimed that consideration of any one of these categories usually requires
simultaneous consideration of the others. For example, if women are lower paid than men
then steps should be taken to address this imbalance, but if you look deeper it might be
that black British women are being paid less than middle-class white women.
One of the most pressing concerns and barriers to equal opportunities is racism. The
best teachers clearly understand the issues, are sensitive to and knowledgeable about
ethnic minority pupils and are not afraid to take appropriate steps, in collaboration with
their schools, to combat racism. Even the term ‘race’ itself is problematic. One reason is
that the definition dwells unnecessarily on surface features and ignores the biological fact
that all people are the same below the surface. Second, the idea that there are people who
Thinking about education 55
are purely from one race is inaccurate because in hereditary terms we are all built from a
mixture of races and if you go sufficiently far back we can all be traced to a fairly small
part of the world.
Poverty is also a persistent problem for education, as it is for society at large. More
than one-third of children in England are defined as being in poverty by international
standards. The country has one of the worst records for improving this situation. Many
excellent teachers have been inspired by a sense of altruism which motivates them to
work with some of the poorest children and families. One of the things that has fuelled
their work in the past was the freedom to put into practice their ideals and to try to find
new solutions to old problems.
Many judgements are made about schools based on socio-economic assumptions. For
example, it is assumed that children from economically deprived backgrounds behave
worse than children from more affluent backgrounds. Although in my own experience I
found that classroom management was more of a challenge in the inner-city schools I
worked in, this has to be tempered by other considerations. Imagine two schools with
similar intakes from the same area. The indicators of poverty such as free school meals,
levels and types of employment, housing and so on are the same. However, in one school
there are serious behaviour problems, yet in the other school these are not as marked.
What are the reasons? Perhaps one school is better managed and organised. Perhaps there
are other more subtle socio-economic factors that have not been taken into account.
Similarly, research shows that the home background of children does have a very
significant correlation with their achievement at school, yet schools in similar areas and
with similar intakes can perform very differently when measured by standardised tests.
How much of this is to do with the children’s backgrounds, and how much is to do with
the effectiveness of the school? The answers to these questions are complex. You need to
maintain an open mind and try to guard against negative assumptions about any groups of
people in the education system.
A feature of education in recent years has been the incredible pace of ‘new’ initiatives.
These initiatives themselves generate all kinds of issues, since they are often based on
unquestioned assumptions. One of the important attributes of good teachers is that they
are able to prioritise changes in practice through a careful process of evaluation.
Professional people never jump to attention just because they are told to. Truly
democratic societies do not expect slavish devotion to new initiatives; they expect
professional evaluation and the ability to use the good ideas and to reject the bad ones.
Nobody can possibly prescribe all the best courses of action for a well-motivated,
informed and experienced teacher. This is why you will develop the mental strength to
challenge, enquire and ask critical questions in the best interests of your children.
Theories
This book has been very much about practice, yet a theoretical framework has
underpinned all the ideas. As I said at the beginning of this chapter, theories are a vital
component in any professional person’s make-up. You should expect any teacher-training
programme to address theoretical matters in addition to a natural focus on practice.
The factory acts weren’t the only significant things to affect education in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The ideas of the French philosopher Jean
Jacques Rousseau were also having an impact. Rousseau’s ideas have been linked with
the notion of ‘child-centred education’. Here is an example of some of his thinking from
his famous text Emil:
Respect childhood, and do not hurry to judge it, either for good or for ill.
Let the exceptional children show themselves, be proved, and be
confirmed for a long time before adopting special methods for them.
Leave nature to act for a long time before you get involved with acting in
its place, lest you impede its operations. You know, you say, the value of
time and do not want to waste any of it? You do not see that using time
badly wastes time far more than doing nothing with it and that a badly
instructed child is farther from wisdom than the one who has not been
instructed at all. You are alarmed to see him consume his early years in
doing nothing. What? Is it nothing to be happy? Is it nothing to jump,
play, and run all day? He will never be so busy in his life. Plato, in his
republic, believed to be so austere, raises the children only by festivals,
games, songs, and pastimes; one could say that he has done everything
when he has taught well how to enjoy themselves. And Seneca, speaking
of the old Roman youth, says: ‘They were always on their feet; they were
taught nothing that had to be taught sitting.’ Were they for that worth any
less on reaching manhood? Therefore, do not be overly frightened by this
alleged idleness. What would you say of a man who, in order to profit
from his whole life, never wanted to sleep? You would say, ‘That man is
crazy; he does not gain time for his joy; he deprives himself of it. To flee
sleep, he races toward death.’ Be aware, then, that we have here the same
thing and that childhood is reason’s sleep.
(Rousseau 1979, p. 107)
During the 1960s and 1970s child-centred education flourished in some schools. Children
were encouraged to be independent learners and to make decisions about their education.
For example, they would be encouraged to think about topics that interested them, to
research them using a range of books, to write about them and accompany this with
artwork, and to present these ideas to their peers. As you read in Chapter 3 on planning
the curriculum, teachers would plan work using ‘topics’ like ourselves, and children were
encouraged to make decisions on the order of tasks, who they collaborated with and how
much time they spent on-task. They were also encouraged to think about other activities
they would like to work at. They were encouraged to state preferences for different kinds
of work and to develop in-depth interests.
The idea that children should have control over their education is so strong that in
spite of temporary problems it will return. Some schools are still acting in genuinely
child-centred ways. For example, there are significant numbers of schools that have
active pupil councils to make suggestions and take decisions.
My own work on children’s rights has illustrated how the UN Convention on the
Rights of the Child offers a strong legal backing for children’s participation in their
education with its mandate that children should be consulted on ‘all matters that affect
them’. This is a useful way of rethinking notions of child-centred education. At one
conference where I presented a paper we were joined by a powerful group called the
Participation in Education Group (PEG). The group comprises children and young people
aged from 8 to 25. Their message, which was presented as a play, was blunt: children are
not encouraged to participate in society. This extract from their presentation/paper, which
uses the metaphor of the nervous system, shows the strength of their feelings.
The idea of a system, which is nervous of new initiatives, especially ones

which challenge traditional concepts of decision making, goes right back
to PEG’s inception. It is also very familiar to many people working within
the field. They come up against this system all the time. They meet local
authority representatives, government officials and policy makers from
national organisations who are very wary of these new ideas. It can be a
struggle to get funding for their work. We will return you to the very
reason for PEG’s existence in the first place:
We want to set up something that will last for children and young
people and help them to make a real difference to how many people in
positions of power actually listen to them and take notice of what they
say. Participation is a necessary but radical shift away from how society
currently treats young people. This shift has to be facilitated by a process
of inventive and unconventional educational practices—to bring about
real changes in young people’s experience.
PEG has been involved with hundreds of training days and many
different projects. Their work has touched the lives of thousands of young
people, directly or indirectly. Their method has been recognised by the
major children’s charities and several magazines popular among people in
the field of youth work. They have received thousands of pounds from
various bodies to continue their work. Yet, despite all of this,
participation—real change in young people’s lives—remains something
talked about by a minority of people, on the fringes of the traditional
centres of youth development. Schools are hardly aware such practices
exist, few youth centres understand what participation really means and
the major organisations in Britain are only just beginning to recognise
how important the whole thing is. What we can say then, after four years
of building PEG up, is that participation remains the property of a small
number of young people.
Theories about child development continue to be an important part of being an effective

teacher. In the early to middle part of the twentieth century Jean Piaget was one of the
first people to research children’s development; before that time childhood was not really
considered important enough to be the subject of research. Piaget memorably defined a
number of stages that children pass through in the course of their development and he
devised experimental tests to assess whether children had reached the various stages.
Although his contribution remains very important because he initiated this kind of
research, his work has been criticised. The main criticisms have centred on some of his
experiments and in particular that the language used to introduce the questions/ problems
was not child friendly. By repeating the experiments, modifying the language and using
slightly different props, researchers have found that children appear less ‘egocentric’
(wrapped up in their own world) than Piaget theorised.
From the 1960s onwards Noam Chomsky has also been an influential theorist on
development. He suggested that children are born with a language acquisition device
(LAD) which biologically predisposes them to learn language. Evidence of the LAD is
illustrated by children’s logical overgeneralisations of certain language features. For
example, children who are learning to talk realise that the past tense of verbs often end in
‘ed’. By generalising they end up with sentences such as ‘We goed to the shops’. Another
influential theorist, Jerome Bruner, reminded us that although nature has a part to play
nurture is also vital, as this brilliant quote illustrates:
the infant’s Language Acquisition Device could not function without the
aid given by an adult who enters with him [sic.] into a transactional
format. That format, initially under the control of the adult, provides a
Language Acquisition Support System (LASS). It frames or structures the
input of language and interaction to the child’s Language Acquisition
Device in a manner to ‘make the system function’. In a word, it is the
interaction between the LAD and the LASS that makes it possible for the
infant to enter the linguistic community—and, at the same time, the
culture to which the language gives access.
(Bruner 1983, p. 19)
Research
Research is important in any field of human endeavour because it provides an

independent view of things that we wish to know more about. How do you decide which
teaching approach to adopt? One of the ways of doing this is on the basis of your own
experience alone. Sometimes you might hear people saying ‘I’ve been doing this job for
twenty years now and I don’t need any fancy researchers telling me how to do my job!’
Unfortunately these people rarely get the best out of children because their minds are
closed to a whole range of possibilities that research can offer.
A modern idea about research that applies not just to teaching is the one of ‘evidence-
based practice’. This is the idea that decisions about teaching should be based on robust
evidence, not just on personal experience and anecdotes. To this end the Department for
Education and Skills (DfES) has funded various schemes to encourage teachers to
become more involved in research, for example, the ‘Best Practice Scholarships’ which
encourage teachers to investigate some aspect of their classroom practice.
In order to base your practice on evidence, it is necessary to continue your reading—
which is another form of research—throughout your training and future career. One of
the attributes of motivated teachers is their almost insatiable desire to know more about
their job. This seems a straightforward idea but there are many kinds of reading. In terms
of the bigger picture of society and the world that we live in teachers have historically
been ‘well read’. An appreciation of the arts, culture, and society at large have been
important features of their reading. In addition, there have always been teachers who
have developed expertise in things which take them well beyond the knowledge
necessary for their job. Teachers who pursue music, visual art, technology, drama, sport,
sometimes at semi-professional levels, have been able to feed this enthusiasm and skill
back into their schools. In a rare moment of weak thinking the philosopher George
Bernard Shaw cynically suggested that those who are not good enough to achieve success
in their chosen discipline were forced to teach. The Teacher Training Agency (TTA) is
right when it says in its advertising that ‘those who can, teach’. If you think about most
people who are at the top of their discipline they nearly all teach in some way. Musicians
give master classes and teach individual pupils, sports people do coaching and managing,
writers visit schools for workshops; all of these activities involve teaching.
It is also necessary to read widely in areas of interest that are directly related to your
job. One of the reasons for this is quite simply that it will make you a better practitioner,
but another reason is that the ability to be creative and put forward ideas is increasingly
important in terms of career progression. Having taken you through some of the essential
features of the job of the primary teacher I am already lining you up for promotion! Most
senior positions in education require people who have the vision to solve problems. This
vision, and hence the ability to articulate ideas at interview, often comes from wider and
more informed views. Being well informed is of course about reading widely.
Another reason for wide reading is that you need to be a critical consumer of ideas.
When you are training to be a teacher you will be confronted with many new ideas.
People often find this experience a liberating one. It opens up the horizons of their
thought. Most teacher trainers enjoy engaging in debate because this fosters learning.
Wide reading enables you to engage in a higher level of debate and hence takes your
learning even further forward. It also gives you the power to challenge some of the ill-
thought-out initiatives that are bound to be tried in the course of your teaching career.
When you train to be a teacher you will probably be given the opportunity to carry out
some research. This is often part of a final piece of work and can lead to a dissertation or
another major piece of writing. It is important because, like so much learning, in order to
understand research you need to experience it. This is not so different to the idea that
primary school teaching needs to include lots of opportunities for ‘hands-on’ learning.
The idea that research should only be a part of your initial training is not helpful. For a
start, the day-to-day job of being an effective teacher constantly involves research. If you
carry out assessments of your children and then reflect on their progress this can be seen
as research. You collect data, you analyse the data, and then you make decisions based on
your findings. There is even a research methodology called ‘action research’ which is
based on the idea of practitioners investigating areas of interest in their work and
systematically reflecting on this in order to try and improve features of schooling.
There have been some controversies in educational research. Some people have
suggested that too much of it does not relate directly to the classroom. This is an
unfortunate misunderstanding of the different kinds of research that exist. Some research
is theoretical: it seeks to explore the relevance of different theories. It may not involve the
researcher setting foot in a classroom. Some theoretical research is important because, as
I have already indicated, theories have direct practical use because they can guide
teachers’ decision making where empirical evidence on practice is unavailable or beyond
the current levels of understanding.
Chapter 7
Becoming a professional
What are the hallmarks of a teacher?
Teachers, like other professionals, are highly skilled

people who are engaged in a complex occupation. First
and foremost they are effective and enthusiastic in their
work with children and the wider community. They are
also sensitive and perceptive people whose inter-personal
skills enable them to work well in teams. Teachers also
have the ability to critically evaluate the key requirements
of their job and, where necessary, take steps to influence
policy makers so that they act in the best interests of
children and their learning.
Before you can become a teacher you have to be qualified. The Teacher Training Agency
(TTA) continues to encourage flexible routes into the profession, including school-based
ones, but the majority of people take up courses at universities and colleges.
In order to be accepted on a training programme there are various requirements that
you have to fulfil. One of these is that you should have achieved the standard of grade C
at GCSE (or the equivalent) in mathematics and English, and science for those born on or
after 1 September 1979. There are requirements for health, and any criminal convictions
have to be declared and are subject to checking by the police.
Unlike other university degree courses, you have to be interviewed for teacher
training. Prior to the interview your universities and colleges admissions service (UCAS)
form or your graduate teacher training registry (GTTR) form will be read by an
admissions tutor. The tutor will be looking for various pieces of evidence. First of all it is
important that there is a clear commitment to teaching, as some people do occasionally
try and hedge their bets: ‘I really want to be a social worker but I’m quite interested in
teaching’ is unlikely to get you an interview. There is also an early consideration of
predicted or actual academic qualifications. Apart from the GCSE requirements the
institution will decide a threshold for the other qualifications which they require for the
offer of an interview; this might include A levels, GNVQ, Access course and so on.
The tutor will also be looking for school experience and evidence that this has been
reasonably substantial; the particular language you use to describe the experience can
give an indication of this. The candidate’s reference is also important and in particular a
comment which relates directly to teaching, such as ‘following a period of school
experience Saima showed the commitment and talent she has for becoming a primary
school teacher’ is likely to be more persuasive than ‘I recommend this candidate for
Becoming a professional 61
higher education study’. Ethnic minority people and men are under-represented in the
teaching profession so institutions are also required to look particularly carefully at
applications from those groups.
Getting qualified
In the chapter on thinking about education I showed how state control of primary
education had steadily increased. This control of the pupil curriculum has been mirrored
by growing control of the teacher-training curricula for primary teachers. The standards
for the award of qualified teacher status prescribe in great detail what must be covered on
teacher-training courses. These government publications include lists of written
statements, called ‘standards’, which you must demonstrate you have achieved by the end
of the course. There follows an example of a standard statement to give an idea of the
kind of language that is used.
Those awarded Qualified Teacher Status must demonstrate that they:

have a secure knowledge and understanding of the subject(s) they are
trained to teach and are able to respond fully and correctly to pupils’
typical questions and misconception in these subject(s).
The standards cover three main areas: professional values and practice; knowledge and
understanding; and teaching. You are expected to have a secure knowledge of the core
subjects of maths, English and science and sufficient understanding of the foundation
subjects based on a range of work in these areas. Competent use of ICT is required to
support your own work and to extend pupil’s learning in the different subjects. Your
knowledge is assessed or ‘audited’ in a variety of ways: tasks to be carried out before the
course starts; formal assessment of teaching; self-assessment moderated by tutors and
mentors; examinations; coursework assignments and so on.
In addition to the requirement that you be successfully assessed against all the
standards, you also have to complete skills tests towards the end of the course. These are
computer-based tests in literacy, numeracy and ICT which all prospective teachers are
required to take whether they are early years, primary or secondary teachers. The tests
can only be done by logging on to computers at designated test centres. In early versions
of the tests candidates were allowed only four attempts but, following considerable
controversy, this requirement was relaxed by government.
As far as maths is concerned there are two main categories: mental arithmetic and on-
screen questions. The mental arithmetic section of the test is heard through headphones
and requires you to answer mathematical questions correctly. The content of the on-
screen questions has two main areas: (1) interpreting and using statistical information; (2)
using and applying general arithmetic.
For ICT the tests address six types of software and contain a balance of the following
kinds of skills: general skills; researching and categorising information; interrogation and
manipulation of information; presentation and communication of information.
The English test is divided into four separate sections covering: spelling; punctuation;
comprehension; grammar. As you can see, all trainee teachers, irrespective of their
subject or phase, have to complete a spelling test before they are fully qualified. The
candidate clicks on an icon which results in the spelling word being spoken through a
digital sound file. The TTA website (http://www.canteach.gov.uk/index.htm) gives
detailed information about the tests.
The tests have caused some controversy, with the English spelling test being a good
case in point. There are times in any job where it is important to ensure that spellings are
correct. For teachers these times include helping pupils with their spelling and reports to
parents, and, because their use of language is a model for the pupils, spelling on boards,
worksheets and so on is also important. However, all adults find some words difficult to
spell, which is one of the reasons why we have dictionaries and spell checkers. Perhaps
the most important lesson for pupils is not that teachers have perfect spelling but more
that if they are unsure about a word they know how to use a dictionary, or if the work is
an early draft they can make the decision to leave the spell check until later. These are
more important lessons for pupils because they reflect reality and model positive
strategies for improvement. Even the DfES makes spelling mistakes in its official
publications. A series of very expensive glossy posters giving advice to teachers on the
teaching of writing were sent to all primary schools. Unfortunately there was a spelling
mistake, so they all had to be recalled and a new set printed. Many of the greatest
teachers in history would have been rejected if their ability to spell was one of the main
criteria.
Trainee teachers are already assessed against all the standards, including the standards
that deal specifically with knowledge and understanding. In addition to this they must
pass skills tests, which surely casts doubt over the GCSE qualifications that are required
prior to the training. A pertinent question that is sometimes asked is: do doctors, lawyers,
police officers, nurses, journalists, politicians have to pass such tests? The answer is that
of course they do not. Some people argue that the tests are an additional burden on an
already over-assessed curriculum; they prove very little about the competencies of
prospective teachers and they are rather low level.
The emphasis that has been put on ‘knowledge’ in recent years raises some important
issues. The TTA commissioned some research into effective teachers of literacy and
numeracy. The literacy research found that the most effective teachers did not necessarily
have the kind of explicit abstract knowledge that is sometimes advocated.
Despite this apparent lack of explicit, abstract knowledge of linguistic

concepts, these teachers were observed to use such knowledge implicitly
in their teaching, particularly that connected with phonics. Our
interpretation of this contradiction is that effective teachers knew the
material that they were teaching in a particular way…they appeared to
know and understand the material in the form in which they taught it to
the children, which was usually as material which helped these children
read and write. The effective teachers’ knowledge about content and their
knowledge about teaching and learning strategies were integrated. The
knowledge base of these teachers thus was their pedagogical content
knowledge.
(Medwell et al. 1998, p. 76)
This is an important finding because it points to the importance of a deep understanding
of pedagogy (approaches to teaching) and children’s needs as perhaps being more
important than abstract subject knowledge.
Teachers prepare subject matter in accordance with what they are teaching at the time.
One of the genuinely important skills is the ability to know how to efficiently update
knowledge in preparation for lessons. This also requires the vital skills necessary to
evaluate the quality of information in books and through Internet sources. It is the process
of preparation, including selection of materials, that is vital. There are many who would
argue that this is important for children’s learning as well. In a world that includes
infinite depths of knowledge with easy access, it is the skills of selection, evaluation and
processing that are at a premium.
Having passed all the standards and successfully completed the skills tests, one of the
final documents to be completed is the career entry profile. This document further
underlines the significance of the standards because it forms a bridge between initial
teacher training and the induction year, which is your first year of teaching. The career
entry profile requires you to identify your strengths in relation to particular standards and
also to identify some targets for development during your induction year. Your school
will have a responsibility to provide support for you during your induction year. This
process underlines the idea that learning to be a teacher is a lifelong process rather than
something that is learned only during your initial period of training.
Some legal matters
The final area of learning which forms part of the standards relates to professional values
and practice. These include knowledge about some key legislation in areas such as equal
opportunities; health and safety; child protection; appropriate discipline strategies; and
professional relationships.
One of the most important aspects of the professional requirements is your role in
child protection. The Children Act 1989 was an important piece of legislation because it
allowed for the separation of the protection of children from any criminal prosecutions
that may occur as a result of the abuse. One of the implications of the act is that people
who work with children have a legal responsibility to protect them and to liaise with
other professionals. Social services is the lead agency which has the powers to investigate
allegations of child abuse. Teachers do not have any powers to investigate but they are in
an excellent position to detect and refer suspicions of abuse. In many training courses,
information on such professional matters tends to come at the end, but it is perhaps better
that information on understanding the signs of child abuse should come at the beginning
because it is possible that trainees will come into contact with children who have been
abused.
One of first things that you need to know is how abuse is defined. The Children Act
1989 defines four main types of abuse:
1 Neglect: persistent or severe neglect of a child, or failure to protect from exposure to
any kind of danger, including cold and starvation, extreme failure to carry out
important aspects of care resulting in significant impairment of the child’s health or
development.
2 Physical: actual or likely physical injury to a child, or failure to prevent physical injury
or suffering to a child, including poisoning, suffocation and Münchhausen’s syndrome
by proxy.
3 Sexual: actual or likely sexual exploitation of a child or adolescent.
4 Emotional: actual or likely severe adverse effects on the emotional and behavioural
development of a child caused by persistent or severe emotional treatment or rejection.
(DoH 1991)
There are no hard and fast rules in the identification of abuse. A child may be being
abused with no apparent outward signs, even to those who know them well. However,
experience with abuse cases has enabled people to be aware of possible signs and
symptoms. As far as trainees are concerned it is important to note that all schools have a
designated person whose job includes referring concerns about abuse to social services. If
you have concerns about a child, your class teacher would usually be the person to talk to
but another option is to approach the designated person.
Following a referral, social services will carry out a preliminary investigation by
checking their records and by making a home visit, but they may conclude that further
action is not necessary. However, there will be occasions when it is concluded that there
has been abuse and the child will be put on the child protection register. If there is a child
in your class who is on the register you will probably be informed (you will not be
informed about children in other classes because this information is confidential).
Teachers have to be especially vigilant about children on the child protection register. For
example, if they are absent from school this is carefully checked out. These children, just
like all children in the class, will also require sensitive support.
Another important feature of your legal responsibilities is your role in ensuring equal
opportunities. I have already mentioned in Chapter 6 on thinking about education that
consideration of race, social class and gender has many linked ideas. Because of the
limitations of space I have decided to focus on race relations legislation, but some of the
practical outcomes of this will have relevance for gender and class as well.
In the light of some high-profile racially motivated murders and attacks, the Race
Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 (which amends the 1976 Race Relations Act) was
passed. The quote below is taken straight from the new act:
71.—(1) Every body or other person specified in Schedule 1A or of a

description falling within that Schedule shall, in carrying out its functions,
have due regard to the need
(a) to eliminate unlawful racial discrimination; and
(b) to promote equality of opportunity and good relations between persons
sof different racial groups.
Teachers and society in general have a responsibility to do everything in their power to
ensure that racial discrimination is eliminated and equal opportunities are promoted for
all children. In order to do this it is important that you develop the ability to reflect upon
your own biases and experiences. This ability to be self-aware is another of the
formidable attributes that the best teachers develop.
My own experience of coming to terms with some of my biases as a white middle-
class male illustrates some of the issues. My parents were both teachers and my
background is a liberal middle-class one. The Yorkshire market town where I grew up
had very few ethnic minority people and consequently most of my school peers were
white. When I went to study music at college I spent my first year in a hall of residence
and one of my friends was a British Afro-Caribbean singer whom I will call Josie. The
hall of residence was in Camberwell in London which is an ethnically diverse area. One
night one of the other students had come home from college; during the walk from the
tube station to the hall of residence she was mugged by a black man. Josie and myself
and a few other students were comforting the victim and for a split second I was on the
verge of using a term of racist abuse about the mugger when I realised that my friend
Josie was sitting with us. I was shocked by this unpleasant glimpse of my unconscious
feelings. Some years later all these kinds of issues were thoroughly explored during my
teacher training course which resulted in my being better able to respond to my teaching
which involved work with significant numbers of ethnic minority children. Unfortunately
the establishment of an over-prescribed curriculum for teacher training has inevitably
meant that there is precious little time to properly explore these kinds of issues.
One of the things that radically changed my perspective on race issues was a
recommendation by a Sikh colleague to read a book called Staying Power: The History of
Black People in Britain. First of all, the concept that history could be written from
different stand-points was fascinating. One of the key misconceptions the book explores
was the idea that black people have been in Britain for only thirty or forty years. It is no
accident that the author opens his book with the following information:
There were Africans in Britain before the English came here. They were
soldiers in the Roman imperial army that occupied the southern part of
our island for three and a half centuries. Among the troops defending
Hadrian’s wall in the third century AD was a ‘division of Moors’
(numerus Maurorum Aurelianorum) named after Marcus Aurelius or a
later emperor known officially by the same name. Originally raised in
north Africa, this unit was stationed at Aballava, now Burgh by Sands,
near Carlisle. It was listed in the Notitia Dignitatum, an official register of
the Roman administrative system, and there is an inscription referring to it
on a third-century altar found in 1934 built facing down into a cottage
wall at Beaumont, not far from Burgh.
(Fryer 1984, p. 1)
It is tempting to assume that only those schools who have large numbers of ethnic
minority pupils need to think about race issues, but as the act makes clear it is the
responsibility of us all. As far as the early stages of your training are concerned you need
to maintain an open mind, be receptive to new ideas and have the courage to reflect on
some of your own prejudices.
Accountability
In a famous speech, a politician once called the primary curriculum ‘a secret garden’,
implying that primary educators basically did what they wanted and nobody was allowed
to see what they were up to. Since that time the primary curriculum has become a
national park, with worrying signs of damage caused by erosion. Many of the changes
over the past years have been made in the name of accountability. Politicians wanted to
ensure that there were mechanisms to make sure that teachers were accountable.
I divide accountability into two main kinds: natural and imposed. The natural
accountability for teachers comes mainly through the work they do with children, their
families and the local community. Parents often have a strong sense of the kind of
teaching they want for their children and if you keep your ears to the ground you will
pick this up. Parents are appreciative of well-motivated, hardworking, kind and
professional teachers. Conversely they will be the first to complain if they believe the
education of their children is not good enough. Teachers are also accountable to the
headteacher, who has overall responsibility to ensure that the education in a school is to a
high standard. Imposed accountability consists of external mechanisms generated by
government to inspect and regulate workplaces. It is interesting to reflect on the extent
that politicians are genuinely publicly accountable in the light of their enthusiasm for
regulating the work of others.
One of the features of teacher training is that you are accountable to the training
provider. Most providers now have partnership arrangements with schools. These
partnerships ensure that schools have a leading role in the training of teachers. This
sometimes comes as a surprise if you have in mind a system where a university tutor
visits you every week to offer feedback on your teaching. In modern partnerships it is the
school that makes the major decisions about your teaching and the university (or other
provider) that agrees (or ‘moderates’) with the school’s judgement.
In Chapter 1 on working with people I mentioned how important the relationship
between class teacher and trainee was, and this also applies to your ‘mentor’. The mentor
in a primary school usually has overall responsibility for the trainees who work in the
school. The mentor will coordinate the work of the class teachers who are directly
supporting you in their classroom. The class teachers do of course take on a mentoring
role, so the terminology can sometimes be a little confusing. Similarly, the mentor will
usually have a trainee in their own class which means they are both mentor and class
teacher. Some institutions have made a distinction between coordinating mentor and
teacher mentor.
The work of mentors and class teachers supporting students requires additional skills
to the ones needed for the core business of being a primary teacher. In the course of your
training you are likely to work with teachers who are effective mentors, and occasionally
you may work with those who are not so effective. The effective mentors, will encourage
you to develop the ability to reflect on your own practice and agree targets for
development. The context for this process is at meetings with your class teacher and/or
mentor to discuss progress. These discussions should centre on your competence in
relation to the standards, and will usually be documented as evidence of your
development.
In order to aid your self-reflection further, you will be encouraged to observe other
teachers at work in the school; for example, curriculum coordinators. This enables you to
learn about effective teaching and to compare this with your own teaching. Some courses
encourage you to carry out peer observation. This is where you work with one of your
peers who observes you teaching and offers feedback, then the process is reversed. This
is a challenging activity which requires you to consolidate your own understanding in
order to offer meaningful feedback to someone else. This consolidation usually results in
a higher level of reflection on your own practice as well as offering something genuinely
useful to your peer.
As a trainee you will also be required to carry out written evaluations of some of your
lessons. This is similar to the requirement to carry out written lesson plans and is
intended to allow the teachers and tutors who work with you to have a window on your
thinking processes. There is a distinct style to an effective evaluation. First of all, as with
giving feedback to children, it should contain some positive observations. Nobody wants
you to trash yourself! These should not be of the ‘I’m the greatest teacher in the world
and today I solved all the children’s problems’ variety. They need to give specific details
of things that went well. Although discipline will naturally feature in the early stages,
beware that this does not become an overwhelming focus. What is really important is to
reflect on the children’s learning. Having dealt with some positives you need to show that
you can also clearly identify things you believe you can improve. Once again be succinct,
but give clear details and avoid bland statements.
Lesson observation is a key feature of monitoring your teaching and you need to
prepare for this carefully. The first issue is to decide the kinds of activities the children
will be doing when you are observed. It is sensible to choose activities that you are
confident will show you in your best light. You should always have a detailed lesson plan
when you are observed. Most observers, whether they are teachers, lecturers or
inspectors, will look carefully at your lesson plan, particularly at the objectives. At the
present time lessons are judged mainly on the extent to which the objectives are clear and
there is an expectation that these objectives will rigorously link with all parts of the
lesson plan and hence the delivery of the lesson itself. While this approach to lesson
planning offers a clear focus, it diminishes the importance of learning which is flexible,
responsive to children’s emerging needs and based on long-term developmental goals.
When teachers’ and trainees’ lessons are observed for assessment purposes it is
common courtesy that some kind of feedback should follow. As with your feedback to
children this will usually start with positive features and move on to points for
consideration. Most of the time this is an exciting process where your confidence grows
as useful feedback helps you to develop your teaching.
One feature of being a professional is how you respond to feedback. The best way is to
engage with the issues that are being raised by discussing them. It is often a good idea to
ask for further clarification. All observers will want to see that you are willing to respond
to their suggestions. It is important not to appear defensive even though you may at times
feel that way. Occasionally observers do not give a fair opinion; schools have
successfully challenged decisions by inspectors on this basis. The way to approach a
problem like this is to respond professionally to feedback and then to follow the
appropriate channels for making a complaint, having spent some time calmly reflecting
on the experience.
At a national level the main mechanism for teacher accountability has come about
through the setting of national targets; for example, 80 per cent of children achieving
level 4 in the English statutory test being the target for 2002. This national target is
translated into local education authority targets, school targets, and ultimately targets for
the children in the year 2 and year 6 classes. Target setting has become a feature of
lessons, with teachers in all age groups being encouraged to set targets and communicate
these to the children. For many years the monitoring of standards was controlled by Her
Majesty’s Inspectorate (HMI), but control of inspection has since moved to the Office for
Standards in Education (OfSTED).
The setting of targets does have the advantage of providing a clear goal, but there are
many many problems with having a high stakes testing regime. If teachers’ jobs are on
the line over the results of tests, then quite naturally they will ‘teach to the test’. This
means that children are given lots of practice and learn techniques for doing well in the
tests. There are limits to what pen and paper tests can assess, so this inevitably leads to a
narrowing of the curriculum. There are also the very real problems of the psychological
impact on children. The pressure flows down from government, to authorities, to schools
and finally to children, and, like a waterfall, the pressure is greatest at the bottom. Your
job is to ensure that children experience as little stress as possible and ultimately to
advocate more appropriate ways to improve standards.
Get that job!
Once you start thinking about applying for jobs it is a good idea to visit the school before
you complete the application form. These visits are important occasions because it is your
first opportunity to make an impression on the headteacher. You need to do as much
listening as possible because you may pick up aspects of the head’s views on education,
including the kinds of teachers they want in their school.
One of the things people find difficult when writing their first application for a
teaching job is how to structure the letter. The important thing to bear in mind is that the
information about the job should include a specification. Good job ‘specs’ include
‘essential’ and ‘desirable’ qualifications, attributes and experience. Your letter of
application needs to address these specifications very closely. If the recruitment process
is carried out properly, the head and the governors will award points to each application
according to the criteria. A shortlist will then be drawn up of the people with the highest
scores.
At interview you should be asked the same series of questions as the other candidates.
The answers you give to the questions will help the panel to decide which candidate they
want to give the job to. If you are not successful at an interview you have the right to
some feedback. Although you will naturally feel disappointed, and may not feel like
finding out why you did not get a particular job, this is a very important thing to do
because feedback can give you an idea of how to improve your performance next time. It
also gives you an insight into the rigour and fairness of the selection process. The
feedback should clearly indicate why you were not successful, and will usually be related
to predetermined criteria. Often it can be very difficult for interviewing panels to make a
decision when they have more than one strong candidate.
Soon you will take up your first teaching job. You will be given your own DfES
teacher’s number and in the induction year you will complete the formal part of your
training. Before you meet your first class you will go into school during the summer
holidays and prepare your classroom. Then, on the first day of the term, you will begin
teaching in the most rewarding profession of all!
References
Bruner, J. (1983) Child’s Talk: Learning to Use Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) (1998a) The National Literacy Strategy:
Framework for Teaching. London: DfEE.
Department for Education and Employment (DfEE) (1998b) The National Numeracy Strategy:
Framework for Teaching Mathematics from Reception to Year 6. London: DfEE.
Department for Education and Employment (DfEE)/Qualifications and Curriculum Authority
(QCA) (2000) The National Curriculum: Handbook for Primary Teachers in England: Key
Stages 1 and 2. London: DfEE/QCA.
Department of Health (DoH) (1991) Working Together under the Children Act 1989. London:
HMSO.
Fryer, P. (1984) Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto Press.
Harste, J.C., Woodward, V.A. and Burke, C.L. (1984) Language Stories and Literacy Lessons.
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Educational.
Haviland, J. (1988) Take Care, Mr Baker! London: Fourth Estate.
McKee, D. (1988) Who’s a Clever Baby Then? London: Arrow Books.
Medwell, J., Wray, D., Poulson, L. and Fox, R. (1998) Effective Teachers of Literacy: A Report of
a Research Project Commissioned by the Teacher Training Agency. Exeter: University of
Exeter.
Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) (2000) Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation
Stage. London: QCA.
Rousseau, J. (1762) Emil, transl. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1979.
The Participation in Education Group (2000) ‘Democracy, citizenship and participation: an unholy
trinity? In K. Crawford and K. Straker (eds) Citizenship, Young People and Participation:
Conference Proceedings December 2000 Edge Hill College. Stoke-on-Trent: JPC.
Further reading
Dean, J. (2001) Organising Learning in the Primary School Classroom (3rd edn). London:
RoutledgeFalmer.
Takes forward a number of the general ideas I have introduced in this book.
Drury, R., Miller, L. and Campbell, R. (eds) (2000) Looking at Early Years Education and Care.
London: David Fulton.
Good general guide with a specific focus on the early years of primary education.
Garner, P. and Davies, J.D. (2001) Introducing Special Educational Needs: A Guide for Students.
London: David Fulton.
Children with special needs create particular challenges for all teachers.
This book is a useful introduction to the issues.
Sherrington, R. (ed.) (1998) The ASE Guide to Primary Science Education. Hatfield: Association of
Science Education.
This guide covers science education from pre-school to the end of the primary years.
Thompson, I. (ed.) (1999) Issues in Teaching Numeracy in Primary Schools. Buckingham: Open
University Press.
Helpful Introduction to Mathematics Teaching.
Visser, J. (2000) Managing Behaviour in Classrooms. London: David Fulton.
Managing behaviour is essential for all teachers, and this book addresses some of the
techniques.
Wyse, D. and Jones, R. (2001) Teaching English, Language and Literacy. London:
RoutledgeFalmer.
Comprehensive introduction to the teaching of English in the primary school.
Index
Page numbers in italics indicate figures
ABC of behaviour management 67

ability groups 27–9
accountability 104–8
action research 94
activities:
differentiation 37;
planning 45–8
armchairs 26
art and design 32, 33–4
asking questions 10, 11
assertive discipline 61–3
assessment 71, 81;
managing 79–81;
observing, listening and offering feedback 71–4;
and planning 44;
types 74–8
Baby Monthly 1–2

baseline assessments 13, 79
behaviour 14, 66–9,
see also discipline
behaviour management policy 55
boards 22
body language 56
boys, single sex grouping 29
break-times 8, 63–4
bright 5
Bruner, Jerome 91
bullying 64–5
career entry profile 100

carousels 50
carpet areas 25–6
chalk and talk see whole class teaching
checklists 78, 79
child abuse 100–2
child development 90–1
child protection 100–2
child-centred education 31–2, 87–9
Index 73
children:
attitudes to 1–5, 54–5, 65–6;
getting to know 6–8;
grouping 27–9;
interaction skills 8–12,
see also behaviour
Children Act 1989 100–1
Chomsky, Noam 91
circle games (circle activities) 7–8
citizenship 32
classroom assistants 13–14, 37
classrooms 21;
carousels 50;
seating 24–6;
space and furniture 21–4
cloakrooms 55–6
closed questions 11
coat hooks 56
computers 33–4, 47–8,
see also information and communication technology
consistency 62
continuity 44–5
core subjects 33,
see also English;
mathematics;
science
counselling 9
cross-curricular teaching and learning 32
curriculum 31;
activities 45–8;
influences on planning 31–7;
lessons 48–52;
planning formats 37–8, 39–40, 41, 42–3, 44–5
Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage (QCA) 33
design 32, 33–4

design and technology (DT) 32
diagnostic assessment 74
differentiation 36–7
discipline 53;
approaches 61–6;
behavioural problems 66–9;
from the start 53–8;
using your voice 58–61,
see also behaviour
displays 22–4
distraction 63
education 83–7;
research 91–4;
theories 83, 87–91
Index 74
Education Act 1870 84–5
Education Reform Act 1988 85
empathy 9
English 32, 35, 80;
standard required of teachers 95, 97, 98, 99,
see also national literacy strategy
equal opportunities 29, 85–6;
legal responsibilities 102–4
ethnic minority pupils 86;
equal opportunities 102–4;
eye contact 9;
grouping 29;
names 6
ethnic minority teachers 96
evidence-based practice 92
extra-curricular activities 48
eye contact 9
facilitation 10
feedback:
assessment 73–4;
job interviews 109;
positive 2–3, 57, 66;
trainee teachers 106, 107
fillers 48
firmness 4, 54–5
formative assessment 74
Framework for Teaching (DfEE) 38, 39–40, 50
friendliness 4, 54–5
friendship pairs 29
Fryer, P. 102–3
games 7–8, 34, 48

genuineness 9
geography 32, 35
girls, single sex grouping 29
governors 13
grouping 27–9, 60
gymnastics 34
Haviland, J. 85
headteachers 19, 105
Health and Morals of Apprentices Bill 84
history 32, 35
home/school agreements 15
homework 15–16
horizontal displays 22
hot-seating 26
humour 12, 63
Index 75
ice-breakers 7–8
imposed accountability 105
independent learning 10
individual work 9, 10, 26
information and communication technology (ICT) 32, 35, 81;
standard required of teachers 97, 98,
see also computers
inter-personal skills 1;
attitudes to children 1–5;
getting to know your class 6–8;
interaction 8–12;
parents 12–16;
teamwork 16–19
interaction, lesson plans 45
interaction skills 8–12, 31
Internet 35
investigations 80
kid watching 31, 71–3, 76
language acquisition device (LAD) 91

learning objectives see objectives
lesson observation 107
lesson plans 41, 42–3, 44–5, 107
lessons 48–52
listening 9, 66–7
literacy see national literacy strategy
literacy hour 41, 49
long-term planning 38
McKee, David 4
marking 73–4
mathematics 32, 36, 49–50, 80;
standard required of teachers 95, 97–8,
see also national numeracy strategy
medium-term planning 38, 39
Medwell, J. 99
mentors 17, 105–6
menu system 50–1
misconceptions 3–4
mixed ability groups 27
music 32, 34–5, 80–1
names, learning 6–8

National Curriculum 32–6, 44, 50, 85
national literacy strategy (NLS) 36, 49, 50, 85;
Framework for Teaching 38, 39–40
national numeracy strategy (NNS) 36, 49–50, 85
natural accountability 105
noise 59–60
Index 76
objectives 36, 41, 44–5, 107;

national literacy strategy 38, 40, 41
observation 31, 71–3, 76
Office for Standards in Education (OfSTED) 107
open questions 11
open-ended tasks 37
pairs work 29
paper 23
Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs) 13
parents 12–16, 67–8, 105
Participation in Education Group (PEG) 89–90
Peel, Sir Robert 84
peer observation 106
personal, social and health education and citizenship 32
physical contact 4
physical education (PE) 32, 34, 81
Piaget, Jean 90–1
planning:
activities 45–8;
and discipline 53–4;
formats 37–8, 39–40, 41, 42–3, 44–5;
influences 31–7
Plato 84
playground duty 8
positive interaction 2–3, 57, 61–2, 66
poverty 86–7
presence 56
process approach 51
progression 44–5
qualified teacher status, standards 96–100

questions 10, 11
race issues 86, 102–4

Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 102
reading 92–3
record keeping 76–8, 77, 79
REG 9
registration 6–7, 56
religious education (RE) 32, 36
reports 78
research 91–4
resources, differentiation 37
respect 4–5, 9
rewards 61, 62
Rousseau, Jean Jacques 87–8
rules 61–2
Index 77
sanctions 61, 62–3
science 32, 33, 80;
standard required of teachers 95, 97
seating 24–6
self-assessment 75–6
self-awareness 102
self-reflection 106–7
sense of humour 12, 63
sets 27–8
Shaw, George Bernard 92
short-term planning 38, 40, 41;
lesson plans 41, 42–3, 44–5
shouting 59
single sex grouping 29
small group work 9, 10, 27–9, 49
space 21–4
spelling 98
spiritual, moral, social and cultural development 32
Standard Assessment Tasks (SATs) 73, 74–5, 79, 107
standards, qualified teacher status 96–100
statements of special educational needs 68–9
Staying Power (Fryer) 102–3
story sacks 16
streaming 28
sugar paper 23
summative assessment 74–5
support, differentiation 37
supported learning 10
Take Care Mr Baker! (Haviland) 85

talking 8–9, 10–11
target setting 107
teacher training 95–6
Teacher Training Agency (TTA) 92, 95
teaching objectives see objectives
teamwork 16–19
technology see design and technology;
information and communication technology
theories 83, 87–91, 94
ticklists 78, 79
tidying up 24
topics 32, 35, 89
training 95–6
transitions 51–2
trips xiv-xv, 8, 51
Index 78
UN Convention on the Rights of the Child 89
vertical displays 22
violence:
against teachers 65–6;
pupil-against-pupil 64–5
voice 58–61
walking trips 8, 51
walls 23
whole class teaching 9, 10;
noise 59–60;
seating 25–6;
space and furniture 22
Who’s a Clever Baby Then? (McKee) 4
work-wheels 50
writing 51
wrong answers 3–4

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Becoming a Primary School Teacher

London and New York

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.

RoutledgeFalmer is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

ISBN 0-203-16715-5 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-26196-8 (Adobe e-Reader Format)

List of figures vii

3.1 The recommended format for medium-term literacy planning 26

3.2 The recommended format for short-term literacy planning 27

3.3 An example of a lesson plan format 28/29

5.1 Record-keeping pro forma for assessment activity 49

What are inter-personal skills? Why are they so important?

Inter-personal skills are social attributes that we use in

Working with children

Your attitudes to children

Teacher A: What’s 6 doubled?

Getting to know your class

T: Good morning Amy

Head: Are you Spiderman?

What’s so special about tables, chairs and cupboards?

Think about thirty pupils in one room. Now imagine the

Space and furniture

Why is the curriculum such an important feature of the job?

The raison d’être of the teacher’s job is learning. This

Figure 3.1 The recommended format for medium-term

In recent years, inspectors have strongly emphasised the importance of short-term

Figure 3.2 The recommended format for short-term literacy

Figure 3.3 An example of a lesson plan format

Children are not particularly interested in lesson plans, objectives, differentiation,

Why is good discipline essential?

A well-managed and safe learning environment is an

Right from the start

Consider the following scenarios:

Using your voice

Supporting children with persistent challenging behaviour

What can assessment tell you about your children?

A part of the teacher’s job involves making judgements

Observing, listening and offering feedback

Figure 5.1 Record-keeping pro forma for assessment activity

Is primary teaching all practice and no theory?

Some people argue that learning to teach requires

What is this education to be, then? Perhaps we shall hardly invent a

The idea of a system, which is nervous of new initiatives, especially ones

Theories about child development continue to be an important part of being an effective

Research is important in any field of human endeavour because it provides an

What are the hallmarks of a teacher?

Teachers, like other professionals, are highly skilled

Those awarded Qualified Teacher Status must demonstrate that they:

Despite this apparent lack of explicit, abstract knowledge of linguistic

Some legal matters

71.—(1) Every body or other person specified in Schedule 1A or of a

Get that job!

Page numbers in italics indicate figures

ABC of behaviour management 67

Baby Monthly 1–2

career entry profile 100

design 32, 33–4

games 7–8, 34, 48

kid watching 31, 71–3, 76

language acquisition device (LAD) 91

names, learning 6–8

objectives 36, 41, 44–5, 107;

qualified teacher status, standards 96–100