foolfillment: the blog

At last night’s TeachMeet for students and probationer teachers I gave a 7 minute presentation on my own probation experiences. It was all very self indulgent I thought but people seemed to like it so I’m going to share it here.

I used Prezi for the first time to collect a few images together, last night I saw some really good uses of prezi – while some people think it can induce headaches I saw last night how fantastic it is not to be stuck in a linear presentation.

Here’s the link to the prezi I used, though I fear that on it’s own it won’t make a great deal of sense as it was really just an aide memoire for me. My main points were somthing like this:

• Make sure you get up to the staff room and speak to as many other people as you can. Don’t hide away in your classroom on your own working.
• Observe as many people as you can, it needn’t be formally but just get into classes all over the school if you can to see how other people do what you want to do.
• Make sure you have a life away from school, find a way to switch off and stop thinking school
• Set aside some time each week to get the GTCS housekeeping done, the stuff you need to do isn’t too onerous but if you let it pile up it can be very difficult to get back in top of.
• Spend time reflecting on how you are doing, it needn’t always be formally, just chatting about things with people helps – see the first point.
• Write up loads of mock application forms and get people to read them. Pester other teachers for their opinions. If possile ask people outside of your subject. Do the same for interviews – get loads of previous interview questions and prepare some answers for them, do as many mock interviews as you can.

Far from a comprehensive list but I think doing those things last year helped me.

Last night was the very first TeachMeet for student teachers and probationers. I was a bit sceptical when David Muir suggested that we could arrange it in just 6 weeks, but I supported it and signed up to attend and even to present if I was wanted.

Then the most amazing things happened.

Everyone pitched in to make last night an amazing success. I think last night was truly crowdsourced, the event organised itself with people from across Scotland helping to sort it all out.

John Daly, Iain Hallahan, and of course David Muir all deserve special mentions, but there was one time in particular that stood out.
Iain was trying to find a way to get in touch with all the NQT co-ordinators in the 32 Local Authorities. Over the course of a night a plan was formed, a collaborative spreadsheet on Google was set up, and a gang of teachers organised themselves to send a letter that had been written collaboratively onto the LAs they had contact with. Within about and hour we had people signed up to speak to over half of the LAs.

And how did we do it? With the power of Twitter and Google Docs. Wonderful stuff because not only did we get this sorted out but a lot of us learned a lot more about how we could use Google Docs to do some really cool stuff that would be useful for teaching.