More tips from Sonia Thompson
Video transcript
okay so what’s your second tip for us today please my second tip is be clear as a teacher be clear about your career pathway and what i’m what i always think is that there are class teachers who want to stay in the room in the classroom and that that for me is gold those teachers are gold because we know the research is clear that they are that is where the difference is made but i also think that it’s those teachers that we want to harness and how do we ensure that whilst they stay in the classroom they are supporting our other teachers in a really consistent way because that is what’s going to help our other teachers to get to that place that we need them to be so i think if we can give our teachers support and advice from senior staff from other practitioners about whether or not whether and this is whether or not they want to stay in the classroom or they want to move into leadership i think we should encourage our teachers to think about that pathway i think often teachers come into school and they as schools we don’t give them the impression that there is a pathway for them and i think teachers need to know that there is a pathway whether you want to be classroom based or whether you want to move into leadership and i think it’s important as a profession that we have that it’s a really interesting list i’d like to dig a bit deeper into this because when i first started teaching i mean i’m old these days so we’re talking about 15 didn’t really have any interest in pastoral and as soon as i saw my how stress my head of department was i had no interest in being a head of department obviously yeah from a secondary background here but the the pathway that really interests me interested me was advanced skills teacher because that sounds like the best of all the worlds i could stay in the classroom and then one day a week i could go work with teachers often in other schools different levels of experience and in those few years i did that i learned so much but obviously ast doesn’t exist anymore so yeah if you’ve got teachers who want to stay in the classroom what is this career pathway for them because it can be can be so tempting because the big money or the bigger money is for taking on leadership responsibilities absolutely how do we kind of what’s in it for teachers who want to stay in the classroom and i think i just think that we need to we we need to be clear with teachers who have the skill and the the knowledge base in the classroom they’re making a difference just how critical they are to our our schools i don’t think we give them enough kudos we are far too quick to push those teachers into leadership yeah and and we take them out of the place where they’re making the most impact so i think we need to a value that we need to teachers need to understand how valuable they are in the classroom particularly when they are making a difference we also need to if i think this is great as as mats begin to grow and we’re not a mat we we are we’re not but one of the things that i’ve been really um passionate about for our school is we we did become a teaching school we encouraged our teachers to become um sles supporting other schools um so all those kind of opportunities it’s great that as a research school we’ve got a role called ele which is evidence leading education and part of their role is to support other teachers with practice as well so hopefully as maths begin to grow in these new roles around supporting teachers with great classroom practice hopefully these are becoming much more there’s much more clarity around them um and i just think if we’re not valuing our teachers in the classroom often we’re getting leaders who jump out of the classroom far too quickly and it’s not credible i always say it you are at your most credible when you are talking about what you’re doing day to day yes and when you’re a classroom teacher and you are doing that with such passion and i know this from personal experience because i when i came out of the classroom i became an english consultant and i would stand there and talk about things and i people would you know they’d give you the side eye because they were like yeah as if as if you’re doing it but as soon as as soon as i went back into school and i when i came to saint matthews i was the deputy i was a teaching deputy but i was still doing some work for the local authority and the difference when you talk about your work when they and you’re talking about what you’re doing day to day teaching moving children forward then there’s a different level of respect so i just think we need to value that this is fascinating this i’ll just share a story from secondary and i’m interested whether this is a thing in primary as well so and certainly secondary math teachers are like gold dust these days because there’s a recruitment crisis and so on and so forth so if you’re a promising secondary math teacher that you can have your pick of jobs basically what’s happening now is you’re getting teachers in their second year of teaching third year teaching or maybe even in their first year of teaching and they’re being offered second in math department promotions even heads of department after having only taught for two or three years yeah the problem with that of course is you get you’re out the classroom but also you’re you haven’t honed your teaching practice to the current you don’t have that kind of foundation of experience yeah and now all of a sudden you’ve got all these other responsibilities on top of it so your teaching never develops but it’s so tempting because you’re being offered an extra four grand a year or six years a year and so on and so forth is that a similar thing in in primary where you know your good teachers have been lured away by by money or is it not quite as big a big an issue it’s it’s probably not as big an issue but there is there’s kind of there is a race to the top yeah and uh and i want i want to be clear here what i’m not saying because it’s not often it’s not age and it’s you know it’s about how it’s about it’s not a stage’s age and often you have some really good people who are younger teachers i’m not and i’m not taking away from any of that but i just want i just want to say again that the craft of teaching the craft of making a difference in the classroom that is our it’s our super power that’s our soup that’s our teaching superpower that is our strength that is our calling card and if we can talk to others and support others to develop that because we are practitioners and because we know what we’re doing and we know how to make the difference then we mustn’t lose that and we’ll i for me i think we’re sometimes in danger of just so teachers being so focused on this career pathway that that part of the pathway is not developed enough yes and i think you know those teachers you do want to spend time because often you know you you’re right you do get people who say oh you know i’ve been teaching for 15 years and i’m sitting in the classroom brah go to those people you know and if they’re the ones that actually how do we use those people if they are practice and talk to others are we using them are we using them have they just become oh they’re the ones in there how do we harness that because i think it’s crucial that we do i agree that was going to be my final question here is because that’s the flip side of it isn’t it there’s one thing wanting teachers to stay in the classroom and hold their craft but the advantage you want the advantage of that to be shared not just with the kids they teach but to spread around the school or even wider so if as a leader you recognize you’ve got a teacher who’s been teaching for five years six years whenever it may be ten years and yet they haven’t had that opportunity or willingness to kind of share their practice maybe they’re modest maybe they’re shy maybe you know and so how is the leader do you bring that out to them how do you encourage them to share and i do think it’s up to us as leaders to really that is par that should be part of our role we should be looking at our staff on a regular basis who is it that we’ve overlooked who is it that we could tap into who could work with who to build their confidence to enable them to do this work and support of the teachers so it is about how do we enhance that i also think it’s great for diversity i think often we can leave teachers in the classroom because they’re not that you know they’re not those people who are the ones that we necessarily always move forward but i think it’s a great way of saying that all of our teachers are valued all of them have got opportunities it’s not just for the chosen few but it’s for everybody and who how do we make sure that that balance of teachers is there that range of that diverse range of teachers is there that we’re giving these opportunities to yeah i think yeah i’m completely agreeing final point on this you’re making me think so much with this i’ve been i’m lucky enough these days to visit loads of schools and work with loads of math departments and what i always do i always spend the first morning visiting as many lessons as i can and making a note of kind of good practice i see and invariably all the things that i would want to work with the maths department aren’t i’ve seen in these lessons there’s always examples and the thing is it’s just not shared around and so yes i’ll speak to the head of department and i’ll say such a person is amazing with minnie white but all right questioning is the rest of the department hasn’t had an opportunity to to see this so there is almost a blindness isn’t there and it’s not necessarily senior leadership it may be yeah level or whatever yeah yeah just the quality of stuff that’s going on within classrooms within you know your own four walls and you get the best professional developments if you can somehow tap into something that’s happening three meters away versus you know calling some expensive consultants and so on it’s yeah it’s frustrating and i think i think that’s where you know even if we i don’t know if we can video sessions video parts of sessions that we can then use as part of our particularly head you know in department meetings where we can see elements of that practice we want to move forward mini whiteboards let’s video craig do in his classroom doing that and then let’s all watch it and pull out what we want to see then implemented so it’s finding different ways of doing that you know rather than you know we because sometimes we haven’t got opportunities to release people but are we missing a trick how do we make sure that we harness that it’s important