Academic Preparation

Academic Preparation 

One thing I can’t stress enough is to make sure you have a break. Go on holiday. Lounge around the house. Have a coffee with a few old friends. While on your PGCE it will become harder (although not impossible) to do these things.

However, I do believe that making a head start will help you in the long run.

Familiarise yourself with key theorists.

Every course will have a different emphasise on their approach to teaching, but the fact remains this; you will be exposed to a variety of theorists. Researching and making notes of the few theorists and theories I have mentioned below will save you a lot of time later in on the course.

Key theories and theorists to research induce:

• Constructivism- Piaget
• Social cognition- Vygotsky
• Behaviourism – Skinner
• Learning styles/VARK- Neil Fleming
• Blooms Taxonomy

You won’t be expected to know everything about these theories, but it will be worth you are becoming familiar with them as they may come up in discussions or essays.

Join teachers on social media

Facebook has a pleather of teaching pages that you can join.

• Twinkle has several pages ranging from NQT to Supply teaching (and everything in-between).
• Someone normally sets up a PGCE (Insert Year) group which caters to students from various courses.
• Your fellow students on your course might set up a page for your course so it is worth checking if they have and consider setting up your own if they have not. It is very handy to have one even if its main use is only to check if lectures are still running.
• TES is another site you should be following to keep up to date with current educational news.
• Find the teacher union pages. NUT, NASUWT and ATL are the most popular.
• Other pages worth joining include teachers selling resources pages.

Twitter is also another good place to find advice and resources. I didn’t use Twitter myself during my PGCE but since finishing my course I have found that other students who did use it found very helpful. Searching for teachers to follow isn’t difficult and there are plenty of articles on the top teachers you should be following. You will also want to follow the union Twitter pages as well for the most up to date information.

Teacher blogs are also something worth following. TES and Teacher Toolkit were the two I read the most during my PGCE year. Ask your university for recommendations or use a search engine to research the best teaching blogs to follow.

On a spate note, I would also recommend talking to teachers you may know. You could email one of the teachers you had work experience with and ask them for their advice. Be warned- teachers are busy and so there may be some delay in a response.

Read books and articles

No doubt your university will have sent you a list of what looks like a hundred books or articles to read. The good news is you don’t have to read them all.  I chose ten articles read on broad subjects and made notes on them. SEN, behaviour management, current theories and the latest issues effecting teachers are all good starting points.

Don’t waste your money on books- I am speaking from experience!

I love books, and nothing makes me excited about a course like buying new books. The forums are full of people telling you not to waste money on books and I didn’t listen. Needless to say, I believe I spent over £400 over the course of the PGCE.

Were they useful? Some.

Have I kept any of them? Only one.

99% of the books I read made very little impact on me. If you need to get essential books, wait until you start university. But even then, I would hold fire. The library will have a copy of the books on the reading list and you can save a lot of money photocopying the occasional chapters you need rather than buying the whole book.  Most of the ‘essential’ books I was told to buy were mentioned maybe once in the lecture. I was told to read some books before a lecture which I did. But I became frustrated when the book was not even mentioned, or I could have easily found the information on the web.

While it is more convenient to have your own copies of books, try the library first if you really must read a certain book. A good proportion of the books I bought were expensive (£15+) and had a shockingly low resale value. So, think carefully before buying books and wasting money.

The only book I did keep and would recommend is called Getting the Buggers to Behave by Sue Cowly. It is a behaviour management book without coming across as too academic. She is eccentric but also brutally honest. One of the most famous parts of the book is when she eats from a can of dog food (Not quite as bad as it seems but a good trick). I enjoyed her approaches and ended up using a few of them my class in my second placement.

Files

The PGCE sometimes feels like death by paper. You become terrified of throwing anything away in case you should need it. That’s why I suggest I am setting up files.

You will need the following folders:

• QTS Folder:

This will be something you complete over the year. Each university will have a set way of laying out your folder.  I will go into more detail about what to put in the folder in later chapters.

• School placement one folder:

Every bit of evidence you collect will be eligible to be used in you QTS folder to prove you are on your way to becoming a good teacher.

• Enrichment folder (If your university does it)

Some universities have an enrichment placement in-between placement one and two. You may have to do experience in a sector you are unfamiliar with such as in a SEN school.

• School placement two folder:

Same as for SP1, you will need a second folder to cover your SP2.

• University work folder (with dividers for each class):

This is to keep all lecture notes together. You can use some of your notes in your QTS folder, so it is worth keeping it up to date and neat.

• Miscellaneous folder:

Keep essays and their subsequent marks, teacher reference number and any other things that might be useful. For the first part of my course, this Miscellaneous folder was a shoe box with all the paperwork I didn’t want to throw away but didn’t know where to put it. It took ages to sort out, so I would advise being organised and putting everything in a folder from day one.

Buy a diary

This is probably one of the most useful things I bought for my PGCE course. Before the course started, I put all the key dates and birthdays in my diary. I also, the week before each key event, put a note to remind me if I had to buy a present or needed something for the event. This was so helpful as sometimes I would be so weighted down with work that I would forget birthdays if I didn’t remind myself.

There are diaries to suit all tastes. If you write a lot, I would look at a daily planner although they can be bigger and heavier than a weekly one. Personally, I prefer a paper diary. I bought a cheap weekly A5 Filofax style planner from WISH with a pen insert as I am always losing my pens.

Good shops to buy planners from:

• KIKKI-K
• Paper chase
• WHSmith
• Amazon
• eBay
• WISH

You don’t have to spend a fortune but try to find a planner that is hardwearing. You might even get a free one when the unions visit your university.

Alternately, you can use an app. The benefit of this is that you can download the app to your phone and it will always be with you rather than having to carry a planner. Some good planning apps to try are:

• Trello
• Planner Pro
• The Happiness Planner
• Planner

Unions

It goes without saying, but unions are something you should be a part of while you are a teacher as well as when you are a student.

The three main unions are: NUS, NASUWT and ATL. Most likely, you be invited to an event held at the university within a few weeks of starting. As a trainee, you can join as many unions as you like. I’d advise doing this and then during your training year, decide which suits you best. You will also want to bear in mind which union most of the staff are in your NQT school. Should issues arise, you will have more support if you are all part of the same union.

Familiarise yourself with the standards

If you haven’t heard of ‘The Standards’ yet, don’t worry. You have plenty of time to research them before you start your course.

There are nine standards you need to be familiar with. Each is broken down into smaller sections.

Part One: Teaching

A teacher must:

1. Set high expectations which inspire, motivate and challenge pupils.
2. Promote good progress and outcomes by pupils.
3. Demonstrate good subject and curriculum knowledge.
4. Plan and teach well-structured lessons.
5. Adapt teaching to respond to the strengths and needs of all pupils.
6. Make accurate and productive use of assessment.
7. Manage behaviour effectively to ensure a good and safe learning environment.
8. Fulfil wider professional responsibilities.

Part Two: Personal and professional conduct.

• Teachers should behave in a way that is professional and that maintains high standards for ethics as well as behaviour both in and outside of school.

More details about the standards can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/teachers-standards

It is worth researching a few ways you can fulfil each standard before you start university. Most universities require three to five pieces of evidence for each standard. It is important to start working towards the standards as soon as possible. That way you will have more evidence to hand and then you can cherry pick the best to show you are meeting the standards and pass your PGCE.

In later chapters, I will give you some examples of each standard and how to use it as it is the main way of assessing you on the course.

Look for resources

In the Appendix, I will include a list of resources I found useful. However, it is always a good thing to have a list of your own preferred resources should you ever be stuck for ideas.

During the period before I started university I made the following headings in a Word document:

• Resources:
  • Math
  • English
  • Topic
  • Science
  • PHSE
  • Starters/Plenaries
  • MISC

I made one for both KS1 and KS2 and would drop the name or URLs of any useful works. You may not know your year group, so it is worth finding resources for a few phases. Facebook and Twitter can be good to find a few ideas.