Question!

[MollyAnna75]

Hi

I have will be changing year groups, from year 2 to 4 and there's a trainee starting in year 2 who has asked for all my planning, resources presentations, etc (which I have painstakingly created from scratch over many years!) My question is, as a trainee, should he be creating his own lessons, etc as part of his training? I'm assuming so as this was the case for me.

I am assuming this is a reverse.

Of course you share everything.

Of course you share. Otherwise someone untrained is trying to do what a trained person can do, with no support.

I would give them the planning overview but allow them to create their own lessons around it, as they would be expected to do, otherwise it's no different from giving a TA or supply teacher lessons to cover. How will they learn to create lesson plans if everything is given to them?

I guess if you feel uncomfortable with what has been asked, then you can contact their in school mentor to clarify?

In general, it's nice to share planning with new colleagues though, right?

I think it's very hard to follow some else's planning. You could give him an overview and allow him to develop his own slides/presentations

Give them the first half e.g. 4 weeks and see hoe much skill and initiative they have to get on with the rest. This spoon feed culture is the worst I have ever seen.

*how

Not to derail your thread but I witnessed today an experienced teacher (4th year) standing in the hallway watching a 'situation' unfold. The woman stood there motionless. Tired of the fake tears and nonsense. Where does this helplessness / over reliance on others to do your job for you come from?

I'd hand them over. Why withhold? What does any person get from you holding them back?

I'd then hope they refine them further to suit their teaching style. But at least they're not starting from nothing. New teachers often just need a starting point. Hell, I've been teaching for a decade and still feel anxious starting from scratch in some subjects. Plus, if the plans are good and just need tweaking to their style, they might actually stay in teaching as they won't have 60 hour weeks. That'd be a bonus.

I an wondering why the planning isn't centralised at your school to be honest. I think it's bad working practice for teachers to have to plan from scratch all the time. Even for new teachers. It is unsustainable and makes the work load intolerable.
Share your resources, so at least this new teacher doesn't have a breakdown by Christmas because they have to plan everything and deal with everything else a teacher typically deals with whilst also being new to the post, getting a handle on training year/s etc and student disipline.
Chances are they will edit plans and resources to suit the needs of their class/es anyway.

Then please get onto your IT guys to set up a centralised place where planning can be stored for future use by all.

I mean come on, you created all your resources from scratch, what crazy hours were you clocking up to do that? I've done it myself and it nearly broke me.

Also so the same for yourself if you can, beg and borrow plans and resources from others for your new class. Don't be a martyr on the sword of workload.

Nobody should have to painstakingly create all of their resources from scratch. That is madness.

All resources should be saved in shared drives on the school networks where everyone can access them and use or adapt them. It’s a shame that wasn’t the case for you as a trainee but this is something that it’s within our power to change without government intervention that could profoundly improve workload issues if everyone did it.

If there’s not a culture of sharing resources in your school, start one. Everyone benefits in the end. Besides, if you want to get technical about it, resources that you create in the course of your work for the school are actually the intellectual property of the school, not you. They aren’t really ”yours” as such.

Everyone in my school shares everything and we split up planning, so this is a totally alien mindset to me. Our new staff have been visiting over the last couple of weeks and access to shared drives and resources have been given by every single department.

No they shouldn’t. Ffs what a stupid suggestion.

How are they meant to learn to create their own resources without being given good ones to use and experience teaching first?

Anything you create at school belongs to the school so they can tell you to hand it over anyway.

For the pps above, horrified by no shared planning - this is extremely common in primaries. I don't save everything to the drive because it's only me teaching it so would be a waste of my time. The curriculum and expectations keep changing so it very quickly becomes reunusable anyway. Drives me barmy - we're all wasting so much time.

I'm Primary, and all staff in my 1FE school has spent the past 3 years carefully writing, crafting and sequencing our curriculum - all subjects, sequenced medium term plans and matching resources. It's a very creative and engaging curriculum, based on our local area and community, and has been a HUGE amount of work. All planning and resources are saved centrally. This enables class teachers and subject leaders to know exactly what has been taught before and what will be taught next. There is lots of flexibility within this, no set formats for PPTs or anything like that, but for example this year I've had a much lower cohort than normal so I've adjusted planning accordingly, but the key content is set.

If I moved to a new year group, or if we had a new teacher then of course all the planning and resources are available. That is our curriculum. That doesn't mean you can't adapt them, or add/change bits but our curriculum content is set - no need to plan from scratch, that would be madness. I don't understand why other schools don't do the same thing.

A trainee or an ECT?

If it's a trainee, what does the person responsible for them say?

When I started a maternity cover in December, the outgoing teacher who had been in the same year group for the previous 2 years didn't share any of their planning with me. I had to do everything and as an ECT1, that was very daunting! Now I've read this thread, I'm shocked that I had to plan everything from December to now and now I think they were mean to me. Glad I'm leaving tomorrow.