TEACH NOW!

Teach Now! The Essentials of Teaching

Anyone who teaches knows that your real training take place inside the classroom. It’s when we teach and when we watch others teach that we really develop our own style, techniques and approaches. It’s when we start to get a sense of the rhythms of great teaching, of the things that work and the things that don’t.

When I trained in Leicester, I remember observing a boisterous Year 8 class being taught English by a veteran teacher. It was a bleak wintry afternoon, the class was losing interest, the noise level was rising unnervingly. The lesson, you could sense, was beginning to unravel. The teacher - my tutor, Bryan, and still a great friend - decided a change of tack was needed. He stood in front of the class, leaned on a chair, and looked across the group. Then he waited. I watched from the back. Then – quite mystically to my untrained eyes – the group fell silent, directed their attention to the teacher, who hadn’t said a word. He smiled at them and then gently announced it was time for a change of tack. The energy of the group was re-harnessed and a new direction set.

I was, I realised, in the presence of an extraordinary teacher and what I was seeing was the capacity of great teachers to muster the self-will, the self-belief and the sense of inevitable bluff that will make a group of disgruntled teenagers fall into line.

Throughout my career I’ve seen similar examples of teachers dealing with challenging parents, calming down situations, laughing with usually-awkward students on break duty, taking a dull topic and sprinkling it with magic – doing all those things that we see great teachers do, day in, day out.

And I think I used to think that it was some kind of divine gift. Now I realise that there are techniques and a mindset that can all of us to become really effective teachers.

That’s where the concept for Teach Now! came from. What is it that really effective teachers do - inside and beyond their classroom – and how far can it be distilled? It’s the stuff you don’t usually get taught when training, but it’s the stuff that you see and recognise when you are watching great teachers at work.

This is the core book, and it’s designed to help you with the kinds of issues that can keep you awake at night – how to deal with the challenging class, how to prepare for a parents’ evening, how to manage stress, even – oddly, you may think – how to have lunch. It works alongside the subject-specific books written by a great team of authors who really know how to prepare, teach and evaluate great lessons in English, Mathematics, Modern Foreign Languages, Science and History.

I’ve written this book after many years of working in a range of schools, of teaching chiefly English (but also Citizenship and PSHE), and of working through all those years with trainee teachers.

As someone who really wasn’t sure whether teaching was for me, who kind of drifted into the profession and then realised how much – on good days – I love it, I decided to write the book for people who are like me: uncertain whether they can ‘cut it’ in the classroom, full of questions, eager to do well but not always sure how. We aren’t always as self-assured as we look.

I wrote the book as a kind of conversation and haven’t been afraid of dishing out advice and tips, even where they risk patronising you with their mind-numbing simplicity. It’s the kind of book I wish I had had when I embarked on teaching as a career.

I hope you’ll find it a really useful companion as you begin your own training and move into your early career in this uplifting, entertaining, occasionally frustrating, endlessly inspiring profession called teaching.

Geoff Barton

www.geoffbarton.co.uk and http://blog.geoffbarton.co.uk/site/Blog/Blog.html

Twitter: @RealGeoffBarton

Activities  

The following activities have been kindly provided by Mike Gershon, author of Teach Now! History. Further resources can be found at www.mikegershon.com.

Activities

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  • The Plenary Producer

    Includes 130 plenaries for use in almost any subject, aiding lesson planning and offering you and your students lots of variety.

  • Plenaries on a Plate

    Offers 168 plenaries for use in all subjects from Key Stages 2-5.

Games, Puzzles, Quizzes

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  • The Starter Genarator

    The Starter Generator provides 120 starters with accompanying pictures and examples to aid recall and enjoyment.

  • The What If...? Box

    The What If...? Box is a brilliant tool for use in any lesson in Key Stages 2-5, containing 168 questions to develop critical and creative thinking.

Guides

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  • Whole Class Feedback Guide

    Includes 25 different strategies for eliciting feedback from an entire class of students. All the strategies are generic and can be used across the Key Stages and the curriculum.

  • The Bloom-Buster

    Helps with planning lesson objectives and provides definitions and question/task ideas for 90 key words related to Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives.

  • Guide to Peer and Self Assessment

    A straightforward guide to peer and self-assessment, explaining how to embed it in your practice and offering examples of good practice.

  • Make your own AFL Box

    Create your own AFL box, which you can keep in your room and use over-and-over again.

Pupil Assessment

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Weblinks  

General
www.education.gov.ukwww.education.gov.uk/schools
www.education.gov.uk/get-into-teaching
www.tda.gov.uk (Training and Development Agency for Schools)
www.community.tes.co.uk
www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resources
www.guardian.co.uk/teacher-network (Useful articles, comment sections and chat facilities)
www.graduates.teachfirst.org.uk
www.teachernet.gov.uk (Advice for NQTs and links to job pages)
www.direct.gov.uk (Links to County Council web pages)
www.teachmeet.pbworks.com (Teachers sharing best practice)
www.oftsed.gov.uk
Exam board websites:
www.ocr.org.uk
www.aqa.org.uk
www.edexcel.com
Job hunting:
www.tes.co.uk/jobs
www.guardian.co.uk/jobs
www.eteach.com
www.epm.co.uk
Image sites:
www.nationalgeographic.com
www.guardian.co.uk/world/series/eyewitness
www.pictures.reuters.com 
www.loc.gov/pictures/ (Library of Congress)
www.sciencephoto.com
Image sites containing historical images:
www.maryevans.com/
www.gettyimages.co.uk/editorialimages/archival
www.cartoonstock.com/vintage/vintage_cartoons.asp
www.life.time.com/history
www.bmimages.com/index.asp (British Museum Images)

Authors Blogs

Geoff Barton
Geoff Barton’s Pick ‘n’ Mix: blog.geoffbarton.co.uk/site/Blog/Blog.html
Mike Gershon
http://mikegershon.com/blog/
Alex Quigley
Hunting English: www.huntingenglish.com/
Tom Sherrington
Headguruteacher: www.headguruteacher.com/