“Success is never final; failure is never fatal; it’s the courage that counts.” Winston Churchill, 1940
In September 2011, we started teaching 150 teenagers.
This blog is based on what we wish we’d known.
In short, if we’d have known how to…
- Manage behaviour with one visual rule & visible consequences
- Plan lessons using a visual template
- Resource lessons through ever-expanding online sources
- Use questions to unlock learning
- Mark books with icons as targets
- Set homework in automated routines
- Motivate students with a big class goal
- Start each lesson with a ‘do now’
- End each lesson with an ‘exit ticket’
… we’d have saved ourselves so much time, stress and wasted effort!
Have a read for any of these reasons:
- Over 40,000 views
- Comments like: ‘I really like this rewards/sanctions system, I’ll definitely be giving it a try this September!’ ‘Love the lesson plan template, a lot more intuitive than templates that I used to plan lessons at a previous school,’ ‘the apps idea is great! officially pinched’; ‘really like the icons idea for marking, and the exit ticket stuff. Really useful’; ‘jam-packed full of top tips and ideas for how to manage marking, monitoring progress, handling homework… loads of useful techniques that I’m definitely going to be making the most of…’ ‘an amazing blog with lesson plans, curriculum outlines, behaviour management tips…’ and ‘This is genius! I’ll definitely be trying this out’.
- Tried-and-tested answers to questions we often have in Teach First schools
Joe Kirby & Kris Boulton
Back to the Whiteboard 
Thanks for taking the effort to share these tips. Very much appreciated!
I’ve really enjoyed reading all the words of wisdom and will definitely take loads of it on board for September. Cheers for taking the time to write, guys!
Hello
Really been enjoying reading the post and picking up bits. Been teaching for a year with Teach First and really looking forward September and being able to use all that I have learnt over the this year.
Is it possibly to access any of your resources – like the lesson plan or you big goals slides? It would be great to put a couple of those up as posters in my classroom. (Don’t worry if not)
Thanks for the ideas!
Hey Catherine, of course you can access them, I’ll send through the lesson plan and the big goal slides to your email address, no worries!
Simply brilliant. Thanks!
Hi,
Interesting Blog which I hope you keep updating. I sincerely hope that you’ve fed back to Teach First either in the Ambassador role or direct to Brett as I think you should have covered/ been exposed to what you’ve ‘discovered’ as part of your initial training. Just a view, but I don’t think its fair on your students to be ‘getting up to speed’ on L &T prior to picking up a substantial teaching load. I think TF is a tough program to go through so well done on doing so. I know you don’t get much time at Warwick but what you outline here are some of the fundamentals of pedagogy. I wouldn’t employ anyone who wasn’t familiar with most of what you describe in your Blog. Please keep learning and adding to your blog and please feed back to TF.
Kind regards,
Steve
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