Feeling overwhelmed

[newteacherwingingit]

New teacher here and feeling overwhelmed!

I'm attempting to navigate this change into teaching, but I am surprisingly finding so many mandatory, time consuming tasks along the way.

What activities are taking up the majority of your time and what fixes are there to this?

I'm sorry to hear you feel overwhelmed- the early years in teaching are hard going.

A lot can depend on the school you are in and the tasks they direct you to do.

Can you speak to your mentor/head of department/someone else? They may be able to support you with how to manage some of the workload.

I am secondary so some suggestions may not be applicable to primary. In my department, we plan collaboratively and all lessons/resources are on the system for everyone to use. They have been carefully written and QA'd so only very minor tweaks are needed depending on the needs of the class. This means teachers can concentrate on their delivery and no one is spending hours planning everything from scratch.

We mark assessments and certain key pieces of work. Otherwise, lots of modelling and live feedback in lessons to keep the marking load to a minimum while still having impact.

Key resources are sent for printing in bulk - small thing but saves having to do it first thing.

As HoD, I do everything I possibly can to keep workload of my team manageable so that we can focus on effective delivery of lessons.

My last school was awful - resources weren't centralised or quality assured so lots of time planning and SLT constantly had more tasks that they wanted departments to do. It meant people often had little time to focus on effective teaching and learning.

Thank you so much for your reply, this is extremely reassuring.

I'll definitely take on board your suggestions!

Firstly, whilst you are on probation/securing a permanent contract, often you do have to work harder than others to some extent, but when you are a little more secure in your school here's what I'd suggest.

Find a longstanding teacher in the school, someone who's ideally been there 10 years plus, and seems friendly and approachable. Obviously don't ask them in your first conversation, but if they seem happy to offer advice, at some point ask them what they prioritise, and what they put to the bottom of their list (the answers may surprise you).

What you'll probably find is that a lot of teachers in the school work on a sort of 80:20 rule- the 80% gets done really well, to the best of their ability, and the other 20 isn't prioritised/doesn't get done/only gets done if it is asked for a second time.

If there are specific tasks that are becoming a time sink, then if you list them, some people might have shortcuts?

But yes, the first year when you've never taught anything before is really tough, and much harder to plan out mentally as well.