Skills to thrive in teaching
Teaching is a job where being organised, managing your time and communicating effectively will help you juggle the multitude of hats that a teacher needs to wear. Teacher workload is one of the biggest reasons for teachers leaving the profession. Being able to organise your work life is important but also being able to balance your work and home life will be vital if you are to thrive in teaching.
Organisation
Being organised is more than just writing things down. Organisation includes time management, establishing SMART targets for yourself and being able to prioritise your workload.
Here are some free resources to support getting organised. A diary is essential for the organised teacher. You should get in to the habit of putting all important events and deadlines in your calendar and checking your calendar regularly through the week.
TOP TIP:
For deadlines you should put a reminder in your diary a week before the deadline occurs so that you can organise your time effectively to have the work completed before the deadline. This will enable you to manage workload more successfully and avoid any unnecessary last-minute stress.
Click on September to download your free no date calendar.
Having a yearly overview of events and occasions in school is useful for organising yourself. Your school will usually have one in some form or another. If it is easy to print you could glue a copy to the inside of your diary or make your own version. It can be organised in calendar months or terms so that you can link events with the school year.
If you know about the World Maths Day in February and the World Book Day in March, then you can be making or buying your costume when you have time earlier in the year or downloading a resource that you come across accidently or while looking for something else.
An awareness of the yearly cycle in school will support good well being and avoid last minute panic and stress.
Career Addict is a great YouTube channel dealing with lots of work related issues in short videos of tips and ideas.
A useful 8 tip video. Not made for teachers so the delegate tip could mean that you ask a TA for help or that some tasks can be given to the children in your class, for example, selecting their favourite piece of work for a display or tidying up the wet play toys.
The tip about having a break every 40 minutes is more for working outside the school day.
Time Management
Managing your time works on an annual, termly, half-termly, weekly and daily level. It ranges from knowing how much time you have for an activity, using your time productively and being on time.
Timescales for planning, teaching and assessing
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You need to understand your statutory learning for the year group you have been asked to teach. Go straight to the National Curriculum on the Government website or you can download summaries for year group learning on curriculum sites such as Twinkl. Make sure that you are familiar with your objectives for the year and keep referring back to them regularly. This will help you think about the pace at which learning should be happening in the classroom.
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As a teacher, your core job is the effective planning, teaching and assessing of children's learning. To do this successfully, you need an overview of all your subjects through the year and when you will teach them. If your school does not have an annual overview like this then you will need to make one of your own. Gather all the information together in one document if you can. Use a page per half term so that you can add some detail. These overviews should divide the yearly objectives into topics and provide you with a quick reference to when and where National Curriculum targets are to be taught.
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Writing a scheme that covers your objectives is the next level of planning. These can range from a couple of weeks in Literacy or Numeracy to termly for a History or Geography topic. Be clear how many lessons you have to deliver this learning and how many targets you need to cover. Teaching is not always a case of logic and finding the average number of targets per lesson but a creative process. As you plan you may link 2 targets together or feel that one target is more conceptual and deserves more time than another. You may find that you can link subjects together. Literacy is a great way to research or investigate a foundation subject, for example, writing the instructions to a Science experiment or a non-chronological report on the Vikings.
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From here each lesson should be created. The previous annual and scheme planning should ensure that you know exactly what National Curriculum targets are being taught in the lesson. You should question what knowledge and skills are needed to show that the target has been learned? How will you impart this knowledge in a way that the children will be engaged and interacting with their learning? How will they show you that they can use this knowledge or skill with support or independently? How will you check they have retained this knowledge or skill after the lesson?
How to prioritise workload
To manage your time more effectively, the 4 D's are a great way to support prioritising work. Think of your workload for the term, week or day and put them into one of these 4 categories - Do, Defer, Delegate or Delete. This may be a quick mental check at the beginning of the day or you may want to draw the table with activities in the boxes if you are thinking more long term. Remember that a Delete for this week may need to be a Do in another week.
Download a template table here.
Creating SMART targets
Once you have decided that a job is in the Do category, you can use SMART to ensure that you don't waste time on unnecessary work. Again, this can work from a mental check up at the beginning of the day, for example, you need to mark the Science books for the last lesson you taught (specific), you will do half at lunch time and the rest after school (measurable), use the school notation better and only use further work if necessary (attainable), the books are being inspected next week (relevant) and you will have them completed before you go home tonight (timely). This is also a great way of organising larger and more long term targets, including handing out the parts and practicing for the Christmas Play or writing the end of year reports. Download a template here.
Being on time
Being on time for work, home and meetings is important. If this is something that you struggle with then try some of these ideas:
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A reliable alarm clock so you never sleep through in a morning.
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Alarms on your watch or phone to remind you of meetings during the day (with time before they start to make a drink or drive there).
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Having paperwork ready for any meeting you need to go to at the beginning of the day.
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Set your watch 5/10 minutes ahead of time so you always arrive earlier than you think it is.
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Setting a time to go home and sticking to it.
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Have a daily schedule written up the night before.
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Start the day with a jog or meditation to clear your mind for the day ahead.
Career Addict have a great video about time management:
A video with 10 tips to help you use your time more effectively. A brilliant round up to support being more organised as a new teacher.
Communication skills
Teaching can become a very isolating role if you allow the workload to keep you in your classroom. You do not need to be everyone's friend or the life and soul of the party but you need to be a good communicator if you are to work effectively as part of a team with colleagues, leaders, parents and the children in your class. Being able to communicate well can mean different things depending on who your audience is but try to use these simple rules to support you as you develop your own strategies:
Diplomacy
The work place is a professional space. When we speak with people about work issues we should always be mindful of this and remember that we are part of a larger team. Teams work best with a bit of give and take and a lot of diplomacy. Diplomacy is the ability to communicate with people without offending or upsetting them. Using diplomacy does not mean ignoring things but it allows you to deal with things much more successfully. If you are annoyed at being asked to produce a piece of work with a short timescale, you can communicate this but without insulting the person asking for it or loosing your temper. Talk about the amount of work you already have on this week and how important it is that the piece of work being asked for is carried out to the highest standard as it could impact the teaching or quality of work in all classes.. Practice finding the professional impact rather than the personal injury in events or requests.
Clarity
Be clear in all your communications. Ensure you know the central point you are trying to make and state what this is. If it requires further information as evidence for your point you can add this at the end or make suggestions as to what you would like to happen next. Try not to bring in lots of unnecessary details or information as your point may be lost. Use diplomacy when making your point but make sure that your audience are sure of the answer or reason for your communication. This may be as simple as a member of SLT asking you to download and plan a lesson for science through the school's new scheme writer by next week. At the weekend you try but realise that you do not have the required passwords. A quick email or chat to make the point that you tried to download and plan as requested by SLT. Followed by the evidence that the passwords did not work and has anyone else been in touch with the same problem? Finishing with asking someone to get in touch before next week's deadline with a password or extend the deadline.
Speed
Most communication requires a speedy response but sometimes if you are feeling annoyed you could use the rule of 10 or 24. If it is an immediate response people are after, such as a discussion in a staff meeting, take 10 seconds to think about your point before calling out so that your reply is comprehensible and you have had time to think rather than speaking in in an unprofessional manner and not making sense. If there has been an event or communication that has annoyed you, take 24 hours to think it through before providing a response so that the initial emotions have disappeared and you can evaluate the situation more objectively.
Style
Communication can take a multitude of forms in our modern technological age. The school might dictate how you communicate with parents and professional standards for other things such as complaints but what about those communications where there is an element of choice? There are no hard and fast rules about these but a few things to remember:
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Emails will serve as a paper trail with dates and the sender and receiver's name on. They are instantly sent and responded to quickly.
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In person or telephone chats / discussions are more invisible depending on who is involved. They do not have a permanent record.
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Meetings can be formally recorded with notes or points of action being shared with all present.
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Messaging services provide fast communication and can be a point of reference for a later date with date and time sent. Even if a message is deleted, there may be a record of it somewhere or by someone.
Building good relationships
RESPECT EMPATHY DIGNITY
Building good relationships can take time and effort but they are important if you are to thrive in teaching. Building good relationships could mean the difference between a strong team spirit at work or getting the promotion to SLT.
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How well we work with others should be based on a mutual respect for other people and an understanding of the dignity we all deserve.
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Always have empathy for others and think about how you would feel if the tables were turned.
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Have an understanding of everyone's roles in school (including parents) and the pressures associated with them. Try to see things from other people's point of view.
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Actively listen when people speak to you.
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Be encouraging and supportive to colleagues rather than negative and critical.
On a formal note, remember the protected characteristics of the Equality Act 2010 are age, disability, gender reassignment, being married or in a civil partnership, being pregnant or on maternity leave, race including colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation. Discrimination on the grounds of any of these protected characteristics is illegal. Be thoughtful in the workplace or the wider parent, governor, guest community of these factors and be welcoming and kind to everyone you meet in the course of your job and life in general.
Work / life balance
One of the biggest criticisms of teaching is the lack of work / life balance. The Government are working hard on this issue in order to support the retention of teachers in schools. Click here to go to the Government's Workload Reduction Taskforce overview page with links to their reports from 2024 and here to download the Eliminating Unnecessary Workload around Marking document published by the Department for Education in 2016!
Each year a Teachers' Pay and Conditions document is updated and published on the government website. From the 2023 academic year update, the following excerpts are of interest.
Be careful here, as earlier in the document is does talk about a teacher deciding on their own hours in order to fulfil their preparation, planning and assessing responsibilities so you may not be obliged to work weekends but you are obliged to make sure your duties are completed.
Staff work / life balance and well being are high on the government's agenda at the minute and accountability has been written into the document for Governing bodies and Headteachers.
What you can do to help yourself
A lot of these suggestions are easier said than done. You need to use the skills on this page to support your organisation, time management and ability to prioritise to help you work smarter at school. Understanding how you work best is also really important. Are you the kind of person who needs a little pressure to get things done in the term but likes to have the holidays free or the kind of person who likes to plan in detail in the holidays so they can have their evenings and weekends free during term time? Knowing your strengths and weaknesses and the things that trigger your stress and anxiety will mean that you can better manage the demands of being a teacher.
Be active. It is proven that being active releases endorphins that make you feel happy.
Seeing family and friends can make sure that you have a strong support network. Having a network of people to talk to means that you are less likely to feel alone or suffer from feeling of isolating or depression.
Having hobbies and interests outside school will allow you to keep your job in perspective. It is only one aspect of your life and not the whole thing.