Behaviour: Noisy Year 7's

The problem: I am an NQT and my first lesson with Year 7 did not go well. I found it almost impossible to achieve quiet.

All my usual tricks - countdowns, three warnings, sending pupils out - didn’t work and barely any learning took place. How can I handle this class?

What you said

“One strategy I used was to make my expectations quite clear. Get them to write down the rules in silence and constantly refer to them - stamp out any behavioural issues immediately.”
Faldamir12

“Countdowns will not work with this age group. I know if I tried it with my Year 8s they would just laugh. In secondary school they have wised up and are unlikely to take it seriously.”
Angelil

“Countdowns do work - I use them through Years 7 to 11. I explain to them that it is a fair way of getting their attention and they all understand this and see it as a way to prevent them being moaned at for talking over the teacher.”
Random175

The expert view

Creating the right environment from the start, by communicating that the classroom has set rules, will encourage your pupils to engage in a focused manner. There are six steps to achieve this:

1. Greet the pupils outside the classroom by standing at the door and welcoming them in. Tell them to sit at their desks and complete a set task which you have previously prepared. Give out raffle tickets as they step into the classroom.

2. It is highly likely that one or two pupils will test the boundaries and will not enter the classroom as you want them to. If this occurs, promptly and assertively say to the pupil, “You’re not ready to come into the classroom - please wait there until you are ready to come in.”

3. Praise the pupils who are completing the set task and reinforce with raffle tickets.

4. Return to the pupil whom you have asked to wait outside the classroom and say to them, “Are you now ready to come into the classroom?” It is highly likely that the pupil will now be ready and will enter the classroom in a calm and focused manner.

5. Regularly “catch” each pupil doing the right thing and praise openly. Pupils love praise, and when they see others receiving it good behaviour becomes contagious.

6. Immediately nip undesirable behaviour in the bud. At the end of the lesson have the raffle draw and give the winner their prize, such as stationery. Repeat this process every time the pupils enter the classroom so they know what is expected of them.

Nicola Morgan is a behaviour management consultant and author of ‘Quick, Easy and Effective Behaviour Management Ideas for the Classroom’. For more information email info@nicolasmorgan.co.uk.

CHECKLIST

Do

• Prepare a task the pupils can get on with as soon as they sit at their desks.
• If any pupils refuse to enter the classroom quietly, make them wait outside until they have calmed down.
• Reinforce good behaviour with praise and rewards.

Don’t

• Allow poor behaviour to go unchallenged.

Source http://newteachers.tes.co.uk/news/behaviour-noisy-year-7s/23604

Preparing for your first teaching job

Tom Bennett offers practical advice for new teachers on how best to use the summer to get ready for the September term

After your pre-induction (if you had one) you face the prospect of six lovely weeks before you start the job properly. It goes without saying (so I’ll say it) that you should pick up a copy of the schemes of work, syllabuses and any resources the department has to help you teach your first term.

•  In terms of planning, it’s fair to say that you should have planned your first two weeks worth of lessons down to the resources and differentiation before you start. It will seem onerous, but the more you can do in Summer to get ready for your first week the better.

The first weeks are overwhelming, and more so if you have to plan all your lessons too; instead, get that part of the job out of the way, and then you can focus on delivering the lessons, behaviour and other matters of orientation.

• Pick up syllabuses and schemes of work. Read the bloody things.
• Get used to the layout of the school, and where all the important rooms are – toilets, staffroom, your classrooms, the office, the head’s office, the department rooms and offices, the playground (!), the canteen, the sin bin. Don’t be ‘the teacher wandering around looking lost’. Some schools have maps, so ask for one.
• Draw up seating plans and get class lists so that you can notionally have them seated and organized before they enter the room.
• Brush up on any topic you’ll be teaching if it feels rusty to you. The danger in this period is that you will over-plan. Depending on how tense you feel, you may be obsessing about it all a bit, or constantly worrying that there is something else you should be doing to get ‘readier’. There probably isn’t, unless you’re being really slack.
• Get your lessons planned, get your bearings, and that’s most of what you need to do. Teaching is an activity where you are learning all the time, and a considerable amount of it is done on the hoof; you can only plan so much before you’re simply planning to relieve anxiety.

So don’t kill yourself; enjoy your summer break (if you have one) and get rested. You’ll need it. Those first weeks were some of the strangest I have ever experienced in my professional life; in at the deep end doesn’t describe it.

Despite all the benefits of the pre-induction, the actual beginning to the induction year is a shock to the system comparable to the scalding hot/freezing cold Turkish bath cure. Let me describe how I felt in one word: busy. I had worked in Soho bars and restaurants on Saturday nights, New Years Eves, bank holidays and Notting Hill Carnivals; I have never felt a keener sense of relentless, endless labour and disorganization as I did in those weeks.

Source: 

New ideas for lackluster lessons

Is your inspiration running dry trying to keep pupils interested?

TES expert Gererd Dixie answers your questions on how to add some creativity at class time

Creativity in mixed ability settings

How can I introduce creativity in a reading class for readers of varying abilities? A typical reading project for my readers, most averse to reading, might be to read Harper Lee's “To Kill A Mockingbird"

Gererd Dixie: One of the things I know works is to use TV soaps to launch such topics as prejudice, bigotry, discrimination using characters that the pupils know well and feel strongly about evokes an emotional response which goes a long way to supporting learning. The limbic brain is the middle part of the brain that deals with our emotions and long-term memory and which asks, "What's in it for me?" If pupils watch soaps they get emotionally involved with the characters and there is real ownership of their behaviour. So if you're dealing with prejudice/racism it's best to start off using characters that pupils care about. The idea then would is to get your pupils to care about the characters in the books that you are studying. Thus evoking a similar emotional tie.

Addressing the needs of girls and boys

I am a trainee English teacher. I wanted to know how to bring creativity in the classroom when I have a class where 90% are boys without leaving the girls out?

Gererd Dixie: It helps to have a knowledge of the neo-cortex, the thinking and processing part of the brain, which is divided into two hemispheres. The left hemisphere focuses on language, logic, analysis and works in sequential manner and builds the whole from parts. Left-brain learners prefer structured tasks, explicit instructions, written information and to work in a logical linear way.

The right hemisphere focuses on visualisation, imagination, rhyme and rhythm and working from the whole picture to individual parts. Most but not all are right brain learners and therefore prefer open ended tasks, self selected tasks, working from intuition and following hunches and guesses. This is why your girls are better at coursework then your boys who generally can't be bothered to go through the whole process when they can answer the question in one sentence verbally in class.

So what can you do to cater for the boys without alienating the girls? One thing you can do is to plan some lessons from a right brain perspective. You could ask the class to provide you with an educated guess or hunch as to the answer to a question you've asked. For example - if I'm teaching about the locational factors involved in siting a reservoir I could use a left-brain approach and take each factor in turn and bore the pants off the pupils.

Or I could simply put a range of photos around the room and ask pupils to stand by the photo which they feel most represents the best site for a reservoir. By doing this I am asking pupils to make hunches or educated guesses to respond to the question being posed. Once more information has been given I then allow pupils to change their position if they change their mind about the location.

This process allows pupils to show their intuition which is often right but even when this is not the case the pupils are hooked into the activity.

The other thing you could do is to present a class with a common learning objective and learning outcomes and provide them with a menu of tasks from which to choose. A nice touch would be to actually use a restaurant menu format to do this.

Thinking outside the box with ICT

I'm training to teach ICT - some units of which are very creative, but others are less so e.g. spreadsheets - any ideas for making the less creative units more so?

Gererd Dixie: How about this - take your class down to the hall and draw out a big filing cabinet using string or rope making sure each filing draw is clearly labelled with a specific category. issue pupils with descriptor cards and get them to go and stand in the appropiate filing draw. No doubt some pupils will get the classification wrong but this will provide ample fodder for discussion.

Do you have any technology tips to help bring out my creativity in history lessons?

Gererd Dixie: One thing that I have seen work really well in lessons is where pupils are provided with an opportunity to vote on issues being discussed in the lesson. Examples of the ‘classroom response/voting sytsem’ are - Activote, activ-expression and ezclickpro. For example if you were voting about who would be the best person to take over the throne from King edward the Confessor you could use such a system. I believe they are expensive but it might be a wise ‘whole-school' purchase which you might be able to book up on occasions.

Subject-specific ideas

Could you point me in the direction of some ideas for cross-curricular PE lessons?

Gererd Dixie: The first thing that comes to mind is the link between sport and politics/history. Eg. Jesse Owen’s famous victory in Munich during Hitler’s time, the boycott of British athletes in the Russian Olympics during the Cold War. The boycott (no pun intended) of the England cricket team playing in South Africa during the Apartheid period, The use of the Olympic platform made by Michael X when giving his Black Power salute. The list is endless.

I would also imagine that there are numerous links between PE and biology - in terms of biorhythms, diet, exercise, health etc but I guess these are the obvious ones. How about getting pupils to plot major sporting teams on to a map. Alternatively you could explore the link between science and sport posing questions about the degree to which it is possible to compare modern day performances with those that took place in the past.

I’m an NQT English teacher. Do you have any tips to help me make my lessons more fun for pupils?

Gererd Dixie: How about designing some ‘dingbats’ for your pupils? These are pictures and words that together help to create a key term or phrase.

If you have seen ‘Catchphrase’ you will know what I mean. For example in my geography lesson I would draw a picture of two cola cans and ask them which rainforest bird this represents – answer Toucan. How bad is that! If you Google ‘dingbats I am sure you will come up with loads of ideas. It would be even better if your pupils could design these themselves. I find this is an excellent way of getting pupils to learn key terms and phrases and have used these in Year 7 classes right the way through to Year 13s where the terminology gets a lot more complicated.

If you want further ideas on creative starters and on how to cater for right brain and left brain learners etc then read Section 12 of the Ultimate Teaching Manual’ available from all good book shops.

One thing you could do is to get your pupils to plan their own starters and to have a go at delivering these in front of an audience – then evaluate the degree they were able to teach and make themselves heard. A bit of empathy never hurt anyone. Hope I have given you a taste of the sorts of things you could do.

Source:http://newteachers.tes.co.uk/news/new-ideas-lackluster-lessons/45845

Advice to help you handle your first assembly!

Ideas for class-based and whole-school activities; plus how to get your class to behave in assemblies

The last time you were in church might have been a tipsy midnight mass or a friend's wedding. But now you're a teacher, religion is back on the agenda. Schools are required to provide a daily act of collective worship. This can be unnerving if it's your turn and your experience of religion is a hazy mixture of hatchings, matchings and dispatchings of friends and family.

Only 20 per cent of schools begin their working day with the statutory "broadly Christian act of collective worship", but there will be an assembly of some kind - by year or house group, or, in smaller institutions, for the whole school, every day. Sooner or later, you'll be asked to take an assembly. Here's how.

In the same way as you would when planning a lesson, decide on your learning objectives.Keep them few and simple. You'll have at most 10 minutes to fill, and you'll have to spend some time giving out information.

A well run school will have a schedule of assembly subjects related to events in the school calendar but it may also include opportunities for delivering parts of the citizenship and PSHE curricula.

What you choose is less important than the ways in which you help your pupils build a positive group identity, and in making the values and purposes of the school their own. Assemblies, religious or not, are important in supporting the social, moral and spiritual growth of your pupils.

You'll need to work on your presentation skills. Use music to set the mood, and have it playing as pupils come in. Turning it off is a clear signal to even the largest groups that you're about to begin. Don't be afraid to use new technologies - a laptop and a portable projector can produce images that everyone in a large hall can see, and can let you share content from any medium.

Assembly rooms are bigger than classrooms. Will everyone be able to hear you? What about lines of sight - will everyone be able to see you? If you have visual aids, are they big enough to be visible from a distance? Eye contact is especially important when you're working with large groups, so pick three or four pupils in different parts of the room, and make eye contact with each of them in turn. You'll look engaged with the audience.

Aim to involve your audience. If the core of your assembly is a story, begin by asking questions to help pupils focus on its subject, and remember that stories are better told than read. Master the bones of the story then improvise around that structure. What you say will sound more personal and convincing. Remember to speak more slowly than usual, too. Give your words time to sink in.

Make pupils work. If one of your learning objectives is to get them to examine and to change their views on an issue, begin by taking a vote to establish what they think before your presentation, and take another after it. You might even use a mini-debate between two well-prepared pupils to help you make your point. Borrow formats and ideas from performing arts and television, such as hot seating, news reports, quiz shows.

Use your tutor group or class to research and deliver their own presentation, perhaps as a short play or interview. It's a good use of tutorial time, and will involve the performers in real learning.

Relate the subject of your assembly to pupils' own experience - take news items as your starting point, or situations from soap opera (or, even better, from The Simpsons). Help them take what they know and encourage them to think about it, and reflect on their own experience.

Use outside speakers. All the public services will be only too happy to visit you. Firemen and police dog handlers always go down well. Mobilise parents. They have a surprising range of skills and experience, so use them, too.

Finally, remember that pupils will be going off to lessons after you've finished with them, so don't over-excite them. Your colleagues won't thank you if they have to spend too much of the lesson to calm them down. End your assembly with a couple of minutes for reflection.

Assembly tips

• Keep it simple. There is plenty of time for all-singing, all-dancing extravaganzas once you have found your feet.

• Encourage children to brainstorm when you are planning your class assembly. Even young children will come up with exciting and fresh ideas.

• Child-generated props, masks and costumes add to the fun.

• Involve parents. Does your school usually invite parents to class assemblies? It may be a nice idea to record the assembly on video. The children will love to watch themselves performing, and working parents will appreciate the opportunity to see the assembly, although some schools and local authorities have policies that would preclude this.

• Ensure that every child has a part to play. No one must feel left out.

• Don't get too stressed about it. Assemblies should not interfere with classroom time.

Make sure your class behaves

Assemblies are unfortunately rife with opportunities for enterprising individuals to create havoc. Make sure your class understands that you expect them to file in and out calmly, and praise those who do, as well as children who have been particularly co-operative.

Position your children carefully. Separate any noisy cliques and friendship groups. Position any who can be disruptive at the end of the line and sit within calming distance. A touch on the shoulder and a stern look are often enough to quieten a child. If not, you are close enough to remove offenders quietly.

Take into account different religions

When planning assemblies or any kind of celebration first check out the different religions in your class. Here’s a quick guide. Jehovah's Witnesses do not celebrate birthdays, Valentine's, Mother's or Father's Days, or other unbiblical celebrations such as Guy Fawkes or harvest festival. Even Christmas and Easter are not celebrated as they are pagan holidays, or fall at the same time as pagan celebrations. Festivals of other faiths, for example, Diwali, are equally proscribed since "we do not celebrate holidays that have non-Christian religious origins or those that promote nationalism". Do not expect Witnesses to join classmates' birthday celebrations, attend firework displays or make Christmas cards that call for celebration (seasonal ones would be OK). Other faiths (Islam, Judaism) may have problems with material, such as Nativity plays, that assumes the divinity of Christ.

Source: http://newteachers.tes.co.uk/news/advice-help-you-handle-your-first-assembly/45539

Top 10 strategies for encouraging good behaviour

It’s far more effective to encourage good behaviour rather than deal with misbehaviour as it arises

The 10 strategies below are designed to help you encourage your children to behave well, so that you can hopefully avoid having to deal with misbehaviour.

Wait for silence

This is the single most effective thing that a teacher can do to get their classes to behave and learn properly. Whatever it take never ever address a class until they are sitting in silence looking at you and ready to listen to what you say. Depending on the children you teach, to achieve silence form your class you might try

• Simply waiting for them
• Giving a ‘silence command’ such as ‘I want everyone looking at me and listening, please’
• Using sanctions for chatty individuals or whole classes
• Giving them a shock eg pretending to bang your head on the desk, storming out of the room theatrically etc

Expect the best

Children will generally live up to or down to what you expect of them. Always expect your students to work and behave impeccably and express surprise (rather than anger) if they don’t.

Tell them what you want

Our students need to know where they stand so tell them exactly what it is you want. One good way of doing this is to use ‘I expect’ statements right from the word go. For example, let them know that ‘I expect you to listen in silence when I am talking’ and ‘I expect you to stay in your seats unless you have permission to get up’.

Give them the choice

Pass he responsibility for behaving appropriately over to your students - it is after all their decision to make. Essentially the children have a choice between doing as you ask and being rewarded or refusing to comply and accepting the consequences of this.

Use the deadly stare

Non-verbal messages are a very powerful tool in getting good behaviour. Learn to perfect the deadly stare so that a single look will silence an individual or a class.

Control your voice

Our voices give away our inner state of mind and can also influence the way that our students behave. Learn to keep your voice calm and relaxed and this will help you control your class.

Praise one encourage all

A quick word of praise to a student who is doing what you want, rather than a snap of annoyance at those messing around will encourage the rest of the class to behave in an appropriate way.

Set the boundaries

When you first meet your class or classes let them know where your boundaries are - what you will and will not accept. A good way to visualise boundaries is to think of them as a box within which your students must stay. Make it clear to the children which behaviours are inside and outside the box and be consistent in your adherence to these standards.

Set them targets

We all like to have something to aim for. Set targets for how your children should behave as well as how they should work . For example a quick target of ‘I want everyone to work silently for ten minutes starting from now' can prove very effective.

Learn to laugh

Use humour in the classroom will show your students that you are human and consequently encourage them to respect you. Being able to laugh at yourself when you make a mistake offers a good counterbalance to the moment when you must be strict and so helps lighten the classroom atmosphere. 

Source: http://newteachers.tes.co.uk/content/top-10-strategies-encouraging-good-behaviour

Top 10 strategies for dealing with misbehaviour

Follow these tried and tested tips to help you clamp down on bad behaviour

Most teachers are faced with at least some misbehaviour in every lesson they teach. The key to preventing, or at least lessening, the stress this misbehaviour causes is to have a number of strategies for dealing with any problems. In addition to helping you cope with stress, these strategies will also make it less likely that the misbehaviour recurs in the future. When the child sees you dealing fairly and rationally with their action, they quickly come to realise that it’s not worth messing with you.

Use ‘I want’ statements

The effective teacher tells the child exactly what he or she wants. Rather than asking: ‘Would you mind stopping that chatter now?’ use the more assertive statement: ‘I want you to stop talking right now and listen to me please.’

Stay calm

However natural it is to get wound up by poor behaviour this will only add to your problems. A calm teacher will deal more effectively with the problem and will encourage the child to stay calm too.

Remove the audience

It can be tempting to address a child’s poor behaviour in front of the whole class. However this makes it far more likely that the situation will escalate into a confrontation. Instead take the child to one side, or even out of the room, before you have a chat.

Defuse, don’t escalate

It is an institutive reaction, when faced with rudeness or confrontation, to start a ‘tit for tat’ battle with the student concerned. However a relentlessly calm and polite approach will be far more likely to cool down the situation and it will also demonstrate appropriate behaviour to the child. Bring your vocal tone and volume right down, until you are speaking with an almost hypnotic calm.

Don’t rise to the bait

Much misbehaviour is designed to get a rise out of the teacher. If you refuse to rise to the bait of a child whose aim it is to wind you up, the tactic becomes meaningless and a waste of time.

Build a ‘wall’

A very good way to avoid rising to the bait is to build a metaphorical ‘wall’ between you and the behaviour. Imagine that a barrier stands between you and the child. However badly he or she misbehaves you are completely impervious to its effects. That way you are in a far better position to deal calmly and rationally with the situation.

Make them decide

When you do have to use sanctions, keep reminding your children that they have a choice at every stage. They can start to behave, accepting the current level of sanctions. Alternatively if they decide to repeat the misbehaviour they will earn a higher level of punishment.

Sanction the behaviour

If a child feels that the punishment is a personal attack, this is far more likely to create a confrontation. Make it clear that it’s the behaviour, and not the child, that is being sanctioned. Keep the whole situation as depersonalised as possible.

Follow it through

Every time you apply a sanction, you must follow it through. For example chasing the child to serve the detention. Otherwise the sanction is meaningless and not worth imposing in the first place.

Make the sanction count

If you set a detention spend time during that detention actually talking to the child about their misbehaviour. Often children don’t really understand why they are being punished, and they need things explained clearly. Hopefully, this discussion will prevent a recurrence of the behaviour that earned the sanction in the first place.

Source: http://newteachers.tes.co.uk/content/top-10-strategies-dealing-misbehaviour

Teaching job application howlers!

Find out the job application mistakes you really should avoid

Regulars on the TES jobseekers forum, many of them current or former heads, explain what really drives appointments committees crazy when it comes to job applications. Make sure you avoid these howlers…

• Documents sent without the name on each sheet. You need to have your name in the bottom margin on every sheet. There was even one supporting statement without any name on it at all.

• Documents sent in non-professional font (Comic sans), or in tiny font - one was 7.5 points.

• An application letter sent in the body of the email, instead of as an attached document. How messy does that look when printed out?

• No letter, nor a supporting statement, just an application form

• Career history given with years but no months. We need to know exactly when, to check there wasn't a nine-month prison sentence somewhere.

• Daft email addresses. Who's going to want to employ someone who chooses to be known as BigBadBoy@hotmail.com or DizzyBlonde@yahoo.co.uk or 7pintsanight@aol.com

• Daft names given to the files you’re sending us: My_Lucky_CV.doc . Or one with the wrong school in the filename: appl_for_Eton.doc. Give your documents a name that includes YOUR name: TheoGriff_CV.doc, TheoGriff_application.doc

• Not giving your current headteacher as a referee. One applicant actually didn't give current head’s details and didn’t put the name of the current school in the application – instead they just put Primary School - presumably to prevent us contacting the head.

• The multi-coloured application, with a photo of daughter at Valentine's Day Ball (no, I couldn't see the relevance of it either), or logos of every place you had ever been associated with neatly pasted in at the appropriate point.

Just remember that the aim of an application is to impress the selection committee so that they actually want to meet you, not to give full rein to the expression of your personality. Just as you dress up for the interview, you dress up your application. Remember this - first impressions do count.

More advice from the TES forums

Zanne3, an experienced teacher who has applied for many positions:

“With over 35 years in the profession I have applied for many positions. It has always been necessary to fill in an application form in black ink, use a font and script that a potential employer can read and to be very professional. That means no shortcuts, plan well ahead, do a draft. Photocopy the form and write out a copy by hand. It is important to have no spelling or grammatical mistakes. Then you can type it out.

For your CV it’s good to have a full version and an abridged one. It’s necessary to fill out an application form for every post in the UK. If you apply abroad you need a professional photograph too. As for referees you must include your last headteacher. If however that is not always possible you must explain why. My last headteacher hardly spoke English but I would still include her, plus previous referees from UK.”

Spursgirl, managed a primary pool:

“I suggest the following points:

• Read the application form thoroughly, and either photocopy or print off a second copy
• Fill it in in rough
• Number additional pages and put your name on them
• Don't try to squash information into small places - use additional sheets
• Trainee teachers - don't forget to add the course you're studying now that leads to QTS

Tailor your application to the job you're applying for. When I was managing a primary pool I once received an application with a six-page personal statement, four of which were dedicated to the applicant's career in banking. He didn't get to his teaching placements until page five. The pool received 500 applications for 150 places, I read every single one thoroughly, but the ones that it was easier to extract the relevant information from were seen much more favourably."

Craig Duncan, regularly interviewer

“For goodness sake READ THROUGH THE FORM/LETTER before you send it. I have read countless applications in recent years which are littered with spelling mistakes, grammatical errors and 'missing' information...straight on the 'discard' pile, if you cannot get it right on your form you are not working in my school

I would also recommend making specific reference to the school and its context when writing the covering letter as there's nothing worse than reading a bland, generic letter. I even read one application where the applicant had not bothered to edit a previous application so there were references to a different school in the application for my school – unbelievable!”  

jphammond, experienced teacher

"How your application is regarded relies more often than not on how desperate the employer is. If there are 1,000 applicants for one job, the person sifting through them will be looking for excuses to chuck out those which do not appear to have a hope of fitting in with the ethos of the place, never mind the ability to do the job.

If the job has been open for months and they only get one candidate, he/she could possibly apply on loo paper with a felt tip and they would get an interview. Supply and demand.

Apply as if you knew there were 50 other candidates for the job and you stand a chance of getting over the first hurdle. This means following, to the letter, all instructions given, spelling everything absolutely right, using proper modes of address, a sensible font, a sensible colour etc, etc.

It's OK to be "chill man" about it, but hippies do not tend to get employed in state schools, except in areas where they are ultra-desperate.

Wrongly spelled address? The envelope may not get opened.

Writing goes outside the boxes? Discarded.  

"write in black ink" - write in blue at your peril, (it does not photocopy well on many machines).

If your application looks slapdash then it will be assumed you are slapdash. Isn't it obvious? Take your application seriously and you will be taken seriously. Letting your own particular philosophical beliefs get in the way may get in the way of you getting a job. All Headmasters and Headmistresses started at the bottom once, so give them credit for some intelligence. And no, I am not a Head but I know people who are!" 

Emilyharvey, moved to teaching from sales and marketing

"Teaching is like any other profession - in order to get a foot through the door with any potential interviewers you have to give the best possible impression from the start. In fact, with the increasing number of people coming into teaching at the moment it's getting trickier and trickier to really stand out from the crowd.

I see it like this: you might like Comic Sans, but you'll live without it in your application form. However, if your potential employer hates the font (who knew there was such strong emotion surrounding a font choice!?!) then you'll be fast tracked to the 'round filing cabinet'.

I worked in sales and marketing before becoming a teacher, and there are lots of similarities to doing a job application. I'm happy in my current job, but I would always personalise the covering letter right at the top with something very specific to the school (i.e. commenting that I agree with their named core values and why) that they have stated on the website. It instantly shows that I have bothered to do my research on their school and am not mail-merging my application; and it is also a quick and easy way to both enhance my suitability for the post and hopefully stand out from the other 100 generic applications.

Better a few fantastic applications than lots of half-hearted ones!"