Looking ahead to my next year of teaching
Saturday, August 30, 2025This coming academic year will be my fourth as a qualified teacher. I would describe my department as "high workload", but now entering my fourth year I feel like I'm finally out of survival mode (going part-time helped with this enormously) and want to start improving. Not that I wasn't improving already — just to be a bit more intentional about it.
It's going to be a challenging year as:
- I have a maths class in each year, all five of them shared with another teacher (organisation challenges)
- My GCSE classes are both foundation level, but I'm definitely naturally more of a higher level teacher
- I've gone from teaching one class PSHE twice a fortnight, to three classes once a fortnight each. So, more PSHE, and more classes.
- I'm teaching two computing classes, one of which is shared.
That's a busy timetable!
Stuff I want to do this year
Improve my PSHE teaching
I find PSHE (Personal Social and Health Ed for non-brits) challenging to teach, probably because it forms only a small part of teacher training. The other teachers at my school also struggle with it, and the students don't seem to regard it as a proper lesson, meaning it becomes a battle with behaviour and engagement. Since I'm now teaching more PSHE, it's time to try and make the most of it rather than just survive it.
My plan is to make structured worksheets (or maybe more like "mini work booklets") for each lesson. At the moment, there is no assessment structure for PSHE, and they work in exercise books, which means a lot of students are writing the absolute bare minimum and then messing around the rest of the lesson. Providing a structured sheet or booklet would make it unambiguous what the expectation is for each lesson (i.e. you will fill in these tasks), and also give me a structure to assess the work. It will mean more work for me, but it'll make PSHE less like pulling teeth, hopefully. And if it works, it might benefit other teachers at the school.
Get better at teaching GCSE foundation
GCSE Maths is split into higher and foundation tiers. At least on my exam board, the easiest questions on the higher exam are the hardest questions on the foundation exam. The higher tier enables access to the highest grades, but weaker students are at higher risk of not passing. I am much more naturally a higher teacher — I'm very qualified in mathematics and can inspire and challenge the most advanced students. But this year, I don't have any higher classes, and I'll have the responsibility of trying to guide a weak class who don't like maths and haven't had much success with it so far through the GCSE course.
One challenge is that GCSE maths exams can have anything on them, from primary school-level maths to the new topics they will meet in year 11. This means with a weak class, there is potentially so much to cover. I will have to make judicious use of assessment to work out which parts to target in lessons, which parts can be reviewed as homework, and so on.
Try out a feature in Obsidian
I have been using Obsidian throughout my teaching career to help me plan and organise my days and my lessons. The way I'm currently using it is I use weekly notes with templates for my school timetables on each week. I also have notes for some of my lessons (I hope to gradually expand this to have plans for the vast majority of my lessons). The theory is that I can then open next week's timetable and then just link to the lesson plans I want to use on each day, and those lesson plans contain links to the resources I'll need. I also use the software for general note taking, writing notes for parents evenings, school reports, and so on.
The hot new feature of Obsidian is bases. These allow you to turn your notes into a database. My plan: create a note for each of my students, and then use the bases feature to track all the stuff I want to be tracking about my students — who is doing their homework, who understands which topics, and so on. Essentially, to use it as a more flexible and less time-consuming alternative to tracking this stuff in Excel.
If this approach is successful this year, I'll consider doing a full write-up (maybe even videos or coaching) for other teachers.
Improve those routines and learning behaviours
This is always a battle, but it's so important. Integrate timers more into lessons to keep students on task and motivated, make sure the lessons start and end well, and so on. Get better routines for questioning and taking questions from students. It's basic stuff, but it's a) hard and b) makes a difference.