Job Share Teacher in 1st year....is this a good idea?

[nearlychrimbo]

My dd starts in Jan and have just found out that her current teacher is leaving at Xmas.

She will have 2 teachers from Jan 2 and 3 times a week.

Can this work?

Ds had job-share teachers in Y1 and they were his best experience of school (he's now 11 and home educated). They worked exceptionally well together, were effectively two halves of a whole, communicated brilliantly and they were the only teachers in his whole school experience who had time and energy (and inclination) to support his SN.

Job share can work in varying degrees. Although our experience was very positive I've heard other parents say it's been less effective for their children. I certainly found that overall the job-share teachers had more energy, were less irritable and far more interested in the children than the individuals who got progressively more knackered as the term went on.

See how it goes, you might be pleasantly surprised, and if not you can raise it as a concern with the head.

Primary school is a great chance for your child to get used to lots of different adults with different personalities. In life we are not going to click with everyone and this is good experience for children at realising that not everyone will be the same. Some children need a disciplinarian, some need mothering, some need energy, some need calm and through their primary education they will probably encounter all these teaching styles which will appeal to some children and not others. You can rely on the fact that there will be teachers your DC will like more than others and if your DC had one full-time teacher this year, they may not have clicked with them anyway. Hope it all works out.

I would be fine with it. DD1 (4) has a different teacher one day a fortnight and knows her name and responds to her well, as do the rest of the class. Also when viewing schools it was very common for the TA to be part of a jobshare, so 3 adults in the class.

We had this in my dc's y1 class. My child was ok with it but is quite an easy going child. A number of other parents were not happy with it as they felt it disrupted their children when there was the changeover between the 2 teachers on a wednesday afternoon ( 2 pt teachers working mon-wedam wedpm-fri )

I've just found out that my daughter is to have two teachers when she moves into Gr1 next year and I must say it took me completely by surprise. These two teachers have not yet worked together (one is totally new to our school) and I am loathe for my child to be part of their 'experiment' (to see how compatable their teaching styles are) in her first true year at school! There is a continuity that comes with having just one teacher and important concepts may become confused for her with two different teaching styles. I have spoken to the one teacher who will be teaching her and she has told me that I am just going to have to 'trust' her! 'Hrumpf!' Short of finding another school - there is nothing I can do! I really think that schools should have information evenings for parents to explain how job sharing applies in the classroom as I am obviously totally naieve!

dd (Year 4) has a jobshare and the timetable ahs been worked so each has a specific remit within a subject which seems fairly successful. However it can take a while for work to be marked and returned by which time the children have moved on to the next task or even the one after.

I know this is an older thread but as a teacher who has job-shared a class I wanted to add that another positive is that if your child doesn't get along with one of the teachers it's likely that s/he will get along with the other. Imagine your child being stuck with one teacher that s/he didn't get on with... you'd be wishing then that your child was being taught by more than one person!

When I've job-shared a class both myself and my partner teachers have bent over backwards to ensure that communication between us, the children and the parents was clear and consistent and that everyone knew who would be in class when. It also meant that if one of us had to go on a course that the other would cover so there was never any need for supply teachers to take the class. The behaviour in our class was fantastic (have inherited the class with a poor reputation this was an achievement) but some of that will probably have been precisely because we were sharing the class; neither of us wanted to kill the class/ourselves/give up teaching by the time we reached a Friday afternoon.

I hope the class-share goes well - they can do!

I have done job-share - it can work very well but depends on the relationship between the teachers. Not all jobshares need a TA to cover PPA - often it is incorporated into the jobshare arrangement so that the teachers cover each other's PPA.