Do I need to be a better trainee

[fluffyslipper1]

So lately I've been teaching Monday to a Friday. I teach a heavy subject -chemistry. I also do uni alongside it but were all done with the lectures now as we just need to work on an assessment profile.

I find it hard to get the balance some days and do everything I need to. For example:

-I usually like to make a mind map of what I want to teach and show the main class teacher

• I have ADD, dyspraxia and dyslexia.
• I am super organised but just need a lot more thinking time than the average
• sometimes I do feel the preassure on me from school and university to do everything to time scales.
• I always say to the teacher that I like to get them to skim over what I've done, anyway the past 2 lessons I've done I end up sending the lesson on Wednesday afternoon for Thursday morning.
• the HOD plans all the KS4 lessons so all we have to do is keep our class in mind and make the lesson fit to the class.
• last week my mentor said to me that I need to aim to send her my lessons or at least a plan well in advance and due to the above factors. I'm really struggling. I mentioned it again. I just can't teach the Thursday lesson and they have the Monday lesson ready for her on Friday morning because I simply cannot balance everything in that time and I don't have frees to even do it in on Friday I also don't email on weekends because no one would reply.

I just mentioned again to her that I have these external factors going on but I feel like maybe she thought it was an excuse to not turn over something in that time. I basically said I'll happily walk you through my aims for the lesson but I probably won't do it as best as I can because I just know myself.

Do I need to be better?

2 working days prior to the lesson is standard. You really need to appreciate mentors are busy working teachers with their own massive workload and family. They will be spending evenings and weekends doing their own work and yet you think you can only plan a lesson if you have a free? And it’s actually already planned for you and you just have to adapt?

My recent student was trying to palm off mind maps of scrawl as lesson plans and her lessons were unsurprisingly a mess and we had to get her to script her lessons, give timings etc for her to teach better.

As a teacher you will have a full timetable and need to be able to plan in advance and let partner teachers know what you’ll have covered next Thursday so they can plan and resource Friday and Mondays lesson.

Yes you need to be better. You are nearly at the end of your training year and not managing the basics of handing in planning. There is meant to be time for them to look, recommend changes and you implement them.

I am baffled by the amount of posts OP writes where they continue to ignore advice and be downright rude to people who have replied, yet some kind people continue to offer advice! A shame to see it wasted. I'm a trainee and although I'm not having the same issues as OP I read the advice, just letting you know that someone is reading and listening!

I can't work out why you say you only start planning the next lesson once you've finished teaching the last one? You do realise you'll have (in most schools) FIVE lessons per DAY, with barely a gap between them, if you take up a proper teaching job??

I'm a chemistry teacher and I plan all my lessons well over a week in advance, so that the techs have plenty of time to prep all the practical stuff. Planning in advance doesn't take any extra work - there are only X number of lessons in an academic year. So, if you plan in advance you are still planning X number of lessons, you're just doing the planning for it a week earlier than you would if you didn't plan in advance!

I am so glad I'm not your mentor your threads are so high maintenance! Do you understand what teaching is? It is planning in advance, adapting your knowledge, working with your colleagues, evaluating your successes and weakness and making lessons better next time. All your threads suggest that you dont understand the premise of this career and you find the normal parts of it unusually stressful.

OP, it sounds like you are feeling overwhelmed. PGCE is hard, and the pandemic means that it hasn’t been the experience you expected. Your mentor will be snowed under doing TAGs at the moment, and they will have their own planning etc to do as well. In order to give them a chance to plan their time and get their own work done and give looking at your lesson the time it needs, you need to get the plans to them 48 hours in advance. You will have needed to have an idea of any practical elements earlier than that, as you probably have to request equipment a week in advance, but the actual full lesson plan and resources do need to be ready to be looked at 48 hours before you teach.

If uni are setting you a lot of work, and something has to give, the uni work is the thing to delay. It’s not ideal to delay anything, as learning to juggle lots of requirements is part of what you are learning this year, but with the uni work you are not making life more stressful for your mentor, or risking giving your students less than they deserve.

If you have got into a bit of a mess with your workload, use the three day weekend to get back on top of things. You should be giving in your plans for Tuesday by Friday morning at the absolute latest, though, because otherwise you are giving your mentor things to do over the weekend too, and that’s not fair. Good luck, OP. It’s a tough training year, but juggling your responsibilities is a key part of the professional training.

The mentor isn't being unreasonable to ask for planning to be submitted more than a day in advance. They really aren't. I'm am NQT mentor so don't really check planning as a regular thing - I have observed enough to know I am happy with what he's doing. He does sometimes ask if I will look over things,particularly something he hasn't taught before, but he wouldn't ask me the day before. He always sends it a good 4-5 days in advance.

I am always willing to help my NQT but I am very busy in my own role and he recognises that.

As a fellow scientist, I am generally planned a week ahead to allow me to organise practical orders etc. I am not a new teacher by any means and also have leadership responsibilities but I always make sure I'm planned.

It's an extremely busy job OP and sometimes, there will be short deadlines for a whole host of reasons. You will need to find ways of managing conflicting deadlines.

Agree with others, if you are a science trainee ( I missed that bit) then in the vast majority of schools requisitions need to be done at least a week in advance. The deadline for ours is Thursday 1pm, and need to have completed all orders for the whole of the following week by then. You need to have short term, medium term and long terms plans anyway.

Have you considered maybe working as a ta for a while after your course to become more confident with the school environment, deadlines etc but with less pressure?

I'll give you a simple answer: yes, you need to be better.

I have 2 trainees in the faculty right now. Both have a form now, and are teaching and providing plans a week ahead. I am part time and need to see and review the plans etc so I can help, advise and check everything.

It's what mentors do. And we don't get the time back or paid for it. And in this year of all years teachers are hard pushed. I'd be really bloody grateful as I know some students haven't got placements.

Next year will be harder than PGCE year and you're going to have to plan a week ahead for practicals.

If your ASD/ADHD/Dyslexia means you cannot cope with the job then it's not the job for you.

Do your placement and uni know about your diagnoses?

I'm not a teacher, first off, but I do have a good deal of knowledge about ADD, etc.

Reading this as a non-professional, I'm wondering if you've got the wrong end of the stick about planning in advance? Because I would think you should know what you'd expect to teach, roughly, in say the next 10 lessons. Ok, it might not all pan out perfectly - my DD2's primary teacher once told me that they had intended to do with with timetables, but quickly realised that the class weren't secure in telling the time, so they had to go back and visit the previous year's work on telling time before they could teach timetables - but you know that you wouldn't teach shell order before you teach what an electron shell is, or how many electrons fill each shell, etc.

Do you think you'd manage to roughly sketch out several lessons, so that you are just making tweaks as you see pupil progression? Do you think you are making your mind map too detailed?

I feel for you a bit. I know several teachers and their pgce was insanely busy, but their NQT year was, too. It's only as they became more experienced that they became more efficient.

Lougle
You're right on planning in advance.
At the start of their training, a trainee would be thinking about their individual lessons, by this stage they should know this overview.

Submitting planning in advance is a standard requirement of ITT providers. Trainees have to do written lesson plans that walk them through the planning process, whereas an experienced teacher might jot a few words in their planner and it's all in their head.
The reason trainees submit planning in advance is because for several reasons:

1. It allows the mentor time to see if there's anything glaringly wrong with the lesson and they can intervene
2. The mentor might want to offer advice or feedback to the trainee on elements of the lesson to help them improve their planning
3. It helps trainees manage their workload. If planning is due 48 hours in advance then it avoids situations where a trainee is trying to plan 4 lessons for Wednesday on Tuesday night. It also means they can have their lessons resourced in good time instead of getting stressed that the photocopier had jammed and you need the worksheets for next lesson.
4. It allows the trainee to show they are acting on their targets. Lesson plans can also be used in their evidence files.

If a trainee is regularly not handing in planning on time then it raises concerns about their competency in the classroom, their engagement (or lack of) in the training process, and the required organisational skills for the job.