You’ve qualified and you feel you should know everything, but secretly you don’t – now what?
Liz Gibbs
I was lucky in my early career. My first teaching job was in a tiny village school where everybody knew everybody. I took over from the local butcher’s wife who had taught Year 2 in the same classroom for 30 years. Talk about big, experienced shoes to fill.
One day a pupil wanted to move his learning on by solving a column subtraction.
Looking back, my degree course had not prepared me well for this moment and I found myself in a position of showing the boy a method I had learnt at junior school. I defaulted to the old “borrow one, pay one back” routine. Like most of my generation, I could perform the steps, but I didn’t really understand why it worked. As I attempted to show the method, the boy asked, “How does it work?” I couldn’t explain it and in desperation started to go through the method again. The boy looked me straight in the eye and said, “We don’t do it like this here!”
As my headteacher was approachable, I went to share this with him, and he sat patiently showing me decomposition. I was lucky he understood that I wouldn’t know everything from day one.
I often tell this story in teacher training and urge all newly qualified teachers to ask their mentors for help when they need it. There is no bolt of lightning at the end of your teaching course, which defines you as an all-knowing teacher. All teachers are a work in progress, and your course can only cover so much.
This was brought home to me recently, when I was conducting research in schools for the NCETM about mental maths. My research included two ECTs in their first year of teaching and, because they felt comfortable and safe, they were brave enough to ask what they felt were their maths 'silly questions':
“How do rekenreks work?”,
“What is a geo-reflector and why would I need one?” and
“How do you calculate on an empty number line?”
They were teaching in mastery schools and felt they should know how to use all the resources. Instead, they were avoiding them altogether for fear of using them incorrectly. They lacked confidence and didn’t want to admit to their gap in knowledge.
As a teacher it is implicit that we are the expert, and this is embedded into the role. However, we need to accept that we are also learners, and that includes our knowledge of maths. It is the only way we can grow and develop as professional educators.
We showed these ECTs a range of key resources and how to use them. At the end of each day, they’d excitedly go away, sometimes borrowing a resource or two. The following session they would then recall what they’d done in school showing us evidence; photos of children’s work and recalling what their children had done and, more importantly, learnt during the lesson.
Mentoring is an additional responsibility for a teacher within a school, but these inexperienced teachers need your time, understanding, help and support. Schools are busy places and it’s easy to assume that everyone knows what every educational acronym means, how systems work in school and how key mathematical resources work.
Continual professional development is essential for all teachers, whether this is through staff meetings, school-based professional development days or external courses, but especially so for ECTs. We learn by asking, exploring and trying out resources such as those on the BBC Bitesize website, just like the children we teach. Accepting that we are works in progress and being curious and open to learning is crucial for developing the future workforce of teachers (who will hopefully spend 30 years in the job just like my predecessor!).
Liz Gibbs is a mathematics adviser to BBC Bitesize. To access its primary resources, visit: www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/primary
