Fast forward to today, and that cohort is now at sixth form or college. A few of them are into their sixth year with me as a form tutor, as I had the exciting opportunity to follow the year group and join the sixth form team in September.

I am now in my seventh year of teaching, rather than my second, so I am at a career stage where I feel much more secure in knowing what I am doing! The years in between have offered highs and lows, challenges and opportunities. I still feel there is a lot to be gained from reading education content across a whole array of platforms - namely, X (even if the glory days of Edutwitter seem behind us), blogs and, increasingly, LinkedIn. However, after a year in which I started contributing as well as consuming such content, as well as starting to consider in more detail my own career ambitions, the time feels right to start collating my thoughts, contributing to discussions and engaging in educational thinking through a wider lens than the MFL blog I originally hoped to curate.

With that, welcome to the Positive Classroom. In the coming days, I will outline the thinking behind the name and what you can expect to see. There will be a combination of whole-school and MFL-specific content, hopefully allowing me to utilise my subject specialism without being constrained by it. If you haven’t already, you can find me on X and LinkedIn. Between those outlets for shorter thoughts and this one for more considered writing, I hope that reflection and discussion will allow me to continue my own growth for my students in my classroom, and maybe even for yours, too.

If you want to join the discussion, please consider subscribing.

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11. Join Twitter

Twitter is an incredible resource for ideas, discussions and advice. Nearly every subject has an online Twitter community or associated hashtag. For example, for MFL look up #mfltwitterati or for English look up #TeamEnglish and there is a wealth of support available. You will hear about and come across people having famed ‘Twitter spats’ but ignore that. The vast majority of the “EduTwitter” community is incredibly positive and some of the best lesson ideas I’ve had during my NQT year have come from threads I have seen on Twitter.

12. Keep up a hobby outside of teaching

You will undoubtedly find yourself working long hours during your NQT year (and teaching in general!) but it’s really important to remember that we work to live, not the other way around. Don’t sacrifice your hobbies. I have a commitment on Saturday afternoons that only actually began on a regular weekly basis during the summer before my NQT year. At the time I wondered how wise it was, but it was great to have something to do each week that wasn’t work, and it held me to ensuring that Saturday was always a work-free day. Which leads me to…

13. Have at least one day each weekend with no work

It’s really important to take time to rest each week. We work hard during the week so we deserve our weekends! Make sure there is one day at the weekend where you do absolutely no work – for me, it’s Saturday but I also try to minimise my work on a Sunday. At least once a month, aim to have a weekend where you don’t work at all. As I prepare for my NQT+1, one of my targets is to minimise my weekend work by increasing my productivity during the week based on an excellent book I have recently read (separate post to follow).

14. Have a cut-off point

Working into the night will leave you exhausted and you will not be a better teacher for it. Setting a time beyond which anything not done will have to wait until tomorrow allows you to more easily maintain a work-life balance. When this is might depend on your individual circumstances, and it might take a bit of working out.

15. When it comes to work-life balance and routines, find what works for you

If you ask teachers how they manage their work-life balance, you will get a different answer from everyone. Some arrive just before the bell and leave not long afterwards because of childcare commitments, but will work at home in the evening instead. Some like to arrive early and leave early. Some will always be the last to leave in the afternoon. Some will work a long day in school, arriving early and leaving late, but then not work at home. Some work long days in the week for completely free weekends. Some are happy to work a day at the weekend to free up evenings during the week. It’s best, I think, to play around with a few of the above to see what works best for you as an individual, and bear in mind that this might not be the same as during your training year.

During my training year, I had about an 18-20 minute drive to and from school each day (down to just 2 minutes for my second placement!) which meant I was in no particular hurry of a morning to beat traffic, and could leave whenever in the afternoon. I generally arrived around 8am on average and left around 5-5:30pm with work to do in the evening which I had plenty of energy for.

For my NQT year, I had to change my routine because planning to arrive at my school at 8am would mean sitting in a queue for 15-20 minutes which I could avoid entirely by arriving earlier. So I trialled a variety of different times but settled on arriving between 7-7:15am although sometimes I was a little later. I still left at around 5:30pm but generally without work to do in the evening, as I found that my 45-minute drive home was also a mental switching from work to home which I found difficult to switch back from. I was also more tired given that I had been awake much earlier than during my training year. If I took much work home to do in the evening, it would often come back the next morning untouched which can be demotivating. In the end I found that if I needed to do some extra work at home, before school was a more effective time to get this done as it meant I arrived at school with a feeling of productivity. It meant getting up ludicrously early, but worked better for me than working in the evening after a long day when all my brain wanted was to switch off.

So my message here would be: play around, see what works best for you. However, don’t burn the candle at both ends as a teacher’s to-do list will never be done and the work will expand to fill all the time you give to it. You might make the odd mistake prioritising but you will quickly learn what can wait and what can’t. I am single and childless, which makes my life a much easier juggling act than it is for many (if not most) teachers. What works for me won’t necessarily work for the next person and vice versa. I still have a few tweaks I want to make to my routine next year to improve my work-life balance, so don’t be put off if you don’t strike the balance right first time. Tweak your routine and make it work for you.

That’s all for now, but one final post will follow to round off this series of NQT tips ahead of September.

6. Make a PowerPoint template you can use for all your lessons

If, like many teachers, you will be making extensive use of PowerPoint for your lessons it will save you a huge amount of time if you have a template ready with slides for things like date, title, LO, homework etc. For the date, use the Insert Date function in PowerPoint and make sure you tick the option for it to update automatically – it gives you one less thing to think about. I also have a hidden slide at the end where I have template text boxes, template disappearing boxes to reveal gap-fill answers and icons for the key skills ready to copy and paste into slides. Over the summer, I’m planning to expand my templates ready to include the layout for my most common lesson activities to reduce my workload further next term.

7. Get to know people, don’t shut yourself away

Some days, you will simply need to put your head down and work through a lunchtime. But make sure you take the time to get to know people early on. Spend time in the staff room getting to know your new colleagues and you will quickly feel a part of the school community. Shut yourself away and it makes this harder.

In particular, get to know key support staff – the site team, reprographics, office staff, finance, any pastoral support staff, technicians, learning support, librarian, catering, cleaners, data team, exams, cover – everyone, basically! There will be a time when you need one of these people to save your bacon, and it’s much easier (not to mention less awkward) if you’ve already introduced yourself. The chances are they will be sympathetic to a new teacher and very happy to help. The running of the school would fall apart without them.

8. Frame your instructions and corrections positively

This is something I will happily admit I still need to work on sometimes. When you are managing behaviour or setting expectations, tell the students what you want rather than what you don’t. Let’s not forget that many teenagers’ stock response to “don’t do X” is to immediately do X, but it’s also about your own frame of mind. If you are constantly telling children “don’t do this, don’t do that” it isn’t the most fun way to spend your day.

So, in practice:

In reality, sometimes we are going to come out with “don’t” phrases and that is normal, natural and fine, but just the process of trying to get into a routine of framing corrections or redirections positively will make the overall atmosphere in your classroom more positive. Plus, a positive instruction is more likely to get a positive response. Students overwhelmingly want to please, so tell them what it is that you do want, and most of the time they’ll do it. Conversely, if you spend half your lesson saying “don’t do this, don’t do that” the mood will turn sour and it will get you down. So, be positive!

Important: Acknowledge when the student responds positively to your correction or redirection with a quick comment so that they know their correct behaviour has been noticed. All it takes is a quick ‘thank you’ or a thumbs-up if you’ve moved on and are mid-flow with your lesson. Catching students doing the right thing is a great way to spread the positivity in your classroom.

9. Have a printed seating plan to hand for quick annotations

Initially, I noted missing homework or lateness that needed following up (e.g. “Mr X let me out late”) on a post-it note, warnings and credits on the board and other notes goodness knows where. Before long, it was apparent that this was not manageable or sustainable. I trialled a printed register to annotate but it quickly became apparent that finding a student’s name on a list every time I want to give a credit or a warning was just a total faff.

I printed out a copy of each group’s seating plan and put them in a clear pocket. That way finding the student was easy as it was based on the seating plan, not register order. I bought this non-permanent red pen. I use it to make quick annotations – tick for a credit, X for a warning, H for missing homework, L3 for 3 mins late, a teacher’s initials if I needed to follow up lateness blamed on them. At the end I can then add anything necessary to SIMS or my records in bulk later. It doesn’t smear and wipes away easily with moisture, so a spray of any cleaning product or even water will do the trick perfectly.

Pro tip: This is also a great way of quickly taking the register. I just scan the room (in my case while they’re doing their silent starter), look for anyone missing and jot down an N next to them, then on SIMS click on the lesson period (e.g. 1MON:1 – above the first student) to select everyone, press / to mark all as present in one go, then change any absentees to N or latecomers to L before saving. The room stays silent and it’s done in 30 seconds.

Side note: always follow up if they say a teacher kept them back; half the time it’s not true or at best a stretched truth, and sometimes the realisation that you will actually check is enough to panic a Year 7 who’s chancing it into being honest! If they know you will always follow up, they are less likely to try to get away with it.

10. Ask for help if you need it

If you’re struggling with something, don’t suffer in silence! Be proactive in asking for help, be that from your mentor or anybody else. Your mentor is likely to either have the answer, have suggestions, or if it’s a particular aspect of teaching they might be able to point you in the direction of a teacher who is strong in that area. When I wanted to improve my management of low-level disruption with Year 9, my mentor suggested five different teachers I could observe. I sent them an email and had almost immediate responses from all of them; I arranged to observe one each week for the next five weeks during my frees and gained a huge amount.

One of my deputy heads said this in September:

Asking for help is not a sign of weakness, the sign of weakness is in failing to ask for help when it is needed.

This is very true. Teachers have all been there. Those with 30 years’ experience who seem to do everything effortlessly were once in their first year. This year in particular, there will be a realisation that you have had less time in the classroom and this will, I am sure, be matched with a willingness to help and share advice. The sooner you seek it out, the sooner you can put it into practice, develop and feel more in control.

In this series of posts I shall share a few tips for NQTs starting in September: some which made my life easier, and some which would have made my life easier had I known about them this time last year! I hope they will be useful. I shall start off with five. These tips are quite detailed, and the next five will be too but I shall also make sure I add a quick-fire list of handy practical tips that are quicker to digest.

Here are my first five tips to start you off:

1. Relax over the summer

This might seem a strange one to start with but I think it’s really important. I was lucky enough to have a July start and I remember jokingly saying on the last day of term, “this will be the one year I’m wishing away the summer holidays” because I was just chomping at the bit to get started! However, I made sure I took time over the summer to fully rest and recharge.

The start of term is very full-on and tiring, and the new routines that will be in place in schools because of Covid will undoubtedly make it even more so this year. While you will want to go in having done enough preparation to get you through your lessons for the first week or two, any more than this is pointless. You don’t know your students yet, so you may misjudge how much they will get done in a lesson – it’s better to have to tweak or replan a handful of lessons than a term’s worth.

Plus, if you haven’t taken the necessary rest to ensure you start in September with full batteries, you will be on your knees by October half term. You probably will be anyway, so best to limit the damage! And on that note, I dislocated one of mine in my first half term, so spent three weeks hobbling around my classroom with a giant contraption on my leg, couldn’t drive and it made all the basics of teaching (like moving around the school or just my room) exhausting in themselves, so I recommend you avoid that kind of damage too!

2. Learn your students’ names quickly (and some ideas to help)

Names are everything. I had class photos for all my groups except the new Year 7s and one of the things I did do over the summer was sit down, study them and test myself. It only took a few hours, but meant that on day one in September, I confidently knew about two thirds of my students’ names, and the rest followed quickly. This is a great tool for behaviour management, as “Adam, listen please” is going to be a lot more effective than “you there, next to the one in glasses” with a pointy finger.

It also shows your students that you care about them. In Year 7 as a student, I had one teacher who knew all our names by week two, and one who still didn’t know mine after three years! No prizes for guessing who was more respected by their students. If your headteacher came to speak to you half a term in but didn’t know your name, you would likely feel pretty undervalued. The same applies with you and your students. Knowing names is a must, and actively learning them should be a priority.

When learning names, I try to make a mental link between the student and their name. I made links to height, to hair colour, to glasses, to personality, to interactions I’ve had such as the student who told me which other languages his family speaks, or the student who saw me in the corridor and told me he was excited to have me as his French teacher. If there’s a link that creates alliteration or is otherwise easy to remember, even better. Of course, there are some students whose names you will learn very quickly thanks to their behaviour, but it shouldn’t take long to identify a link for everyone and sooner or later you won’t need to rely on them any more.

3. Set out your expectations clearly, and stick to them relentlessly

The first time students see you, they will be sussing you out. Take the time in the first lesson to set out your expectations, what will happen if they are met and what will happen if they are not. And stick to it. There will be students who test you to see what they can get away with. It’s understandable not to want to come across like a dragon on the first day, but speaking to another NQT in my school at the start of lockdown, we both said we wished we had been stricter at the start. Students value boundaries and consistency. If they perceive you to be inconsistent with how you apply the boundaries, they won’t hesitate to let you know! If you are firm but fair, you can’t go far wrong and the vast majority will meet your expectations the vast majority of the time.

4. Create routines to make transitions smooth

I am lucky to work in a school with a school-wide routine for the start of lessons (a silent retrieval activity for the first 5 mins), which meant that students know exactly what the expectation is and I just had to enforce it. As a result, the start of lessons were an area I rarely struggled with even at the beginning. Where I struggled was with mid-lesson transitions, for example pockets of chatter as mini-whiteboards were handed out, or as I went round checking homework had been done. Think about where these pockets could emerge and create routines to minimise the possibility of it happening. Set out these routines explicitly and explain why they are there. I changed my routine for collecting books in after Christmas to sharpen it up, but to make sure the students bought in, I explained how speeding this up would minimise wasted time at the start of lessons and maximise time available for learning and making progress. They knew why I had set a new expectation, so they went with it.

Here are some routines I established during the year:

• If I’m blanket checking homework completion, I ask them to hold it up and it only takes a few seconds to scan the room.

• I got zip-up pouches to store a row’s worth of mini-whiteboards in and gave a target time for students to hand them out in (this also gave them a focus, especially if I played them off against another class in their year group).

• Books were collected in seating order by row, and I put a sheet of cardboard in between each row, landscape so it would stick out. To hand them back out, I could just walk down the room during lesson changeover and put a pile at the end of each row. The first student to arrive in each row knew it was their responsibility to hand them out, and they could just walk along the row as the books were already in order. Job done in seconds.

5. Create a folder for ‘Nice things’ in your inbox

The NQT year will bring moments where you feel like everything is on top of you rather than the other way round. Perhaps a parent has complained or you’ve had a crash-and-burn lesson. These will both happen at some point, and it can be deflating.

However, there will be moments (hopefully many more of them!) where you will be appreciated, or receive some good feedback. If someone emails you to say how wonderful you are or thank you for something – the ones that make you smile and think ‘that’s a lovely email’ – put it into a folder ready for the less lovely moments when you find your motivation dropping. In those moments, open up your folder (mine is called ‘Nice things’) and read through these emails to remind yourself why you’re great and why this job is too.

It’s too easy to dwell on the negatives and important to pay just as much attention on the positives, as they really do outnumber the negatives by a long way.

That’s all for now…

That concludes my first set of hints for new NQTs, and on reflection most of them are very generic and not pandemic-related at all. I will add my next set in the coming days, but if you have any questions in the meantime that I could address in the next posts, or if you are a more experienced teacher and have your own tips to share, or if you just want to start a discussion, please feel free to leave a comment.