Careers in Teaching Education

Headteachers take on a unique role within a school or academy, managing its day to day running as well as managing members of staff. They will also have responsibilities to do with budgets and curriculums, making their role very academic and management heavy. This differs quite substantially to the role of a classroom teacher.

Most headteachers will have started out as teachers. It is usually a requirements that they are able to teach lessons and have a good understanding of education, in a way that only a teacher can. This gives the person a unique insight into the way children learn, and helps them to develop behaviour policies and overall standards within the school.

Whilst most headteachers will come from a teaching background, they will often have other qualifications as well. A teacher who is keen to become the head of a school might take an MA in education, or an additional management qualification.

Teaching in secondary school requires a very different skill set to teaching in a primary school. Children of different ages present teachers with different challenges, meaning it can be harder to switch between the two. If you are a primary teacher thinking of working in a secondary school, you may also need to get different qualifications.

Here are some of the main differences you will ned to consider:

• More academic curriculum. You will be teaching subjects that are more in depth and more challenging academically.
• You will specialise in a certain subject. You won’t be teaching everything to your class – you will be teaching various classes one subject. This means you will need more knowledge on that subject and will have to work with lots of different children.
• Children will ask very different questions. They will be thinking about their subjects in more depth, so you may need to learn the answers to some of their more difficult questions!

Teaching is a valuable skill to have and it doesn’t just have to be relevant in the classroom. As a trained teacher, you have lots of options when considering a career change. There are specific, unique skills you learn as a teacher that will be very desirable and will stand you in good stead within the private job market.

If you can control a class full of rowdy, screaming children, you are going to be able to control and manage people in the workplace, most of whom might even actually want to be there! People will really value the disciplinary skills you have learnt and will be glad to take you on in a management role.

Other organisation will recognise your ability to teach and will be glad to have you in their training or education departments. You could end up working in fields like staff training, or perhaps in an outreach programme.

Teachers have one of the busiest and most challenging jobs around. Who else can say they have to manage groups of 30 people and make sure they achieve great results, without them even necessarily wanting to be there? You will be incredibly busy as a teacher so you need to manage your workload well.

Luckily, there are lots of steps you can take to make your workload more manageable. Make sure you are incredibly organised and know your priorities. Every day, reorganise your priorities and make sure everything will be done well.

You will also need to rely on other people and use their expertise as well as you can. Ask your department leader and the senior members of staff in your school for support whenever you need it.

Look for new ways to do things. If you find marking takes too long, look for new processes. You could get your pupils to help out.

It can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that learning stops once we leave school. We may learn some new things from our employers but in general, we think that the majority of our learning has finished. This isn’t true as there are always new things that we can learn. You may be surprised to think that many of these things can actually be learned on our own without the help or support of others.

Much of the desire to learn comes from us and will be shaped by our need to find out new things. We can do this every day on our own at work. We can find out new things from the people around us and from the internet, reading around our jobs to find out more about the topics that interest us. As well as finding out new things to satisfy our own curiosity, this will also help us to progress in a job.

The IFS (Institute for Fiscal Studies) has recently come out with a report that examined how the “wage premium” experienced by graduates changed from the generation graduating in the 80’s and those graduating from the 90’s. Despite a more than doubling of the number of graduates seen in the 90’s, the wage premium continued to retain its value in its wider social context.

This may come as a surprise to many, as it seems to defy common sense. However, what it appears to indicate is that, although the supply of graduates has increased explosively, the demand for them has more than kept apace. (more…)

A study was recently conducted by MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, into the effects devices like Ipads and Laptops and access to the internet, have on the results students get in the classroom, which shows the general trend of worse results among students who use them in the classroom.

In the study, 726 undergraduates were split into three different groups randomly; one acting as the control with no access to devices, another one where they were allowed unrestricted access to them, and finally one where there was restricted access. The study took place in the West Point naval academy in the USA, where student ranking is determined mostly by exam results and competition is purposely kept at a very high level, so people were very motivated to succeed and ignore distractions. (more…)

Teaching in high school is a demanding job, and depending on what subject you’re teaching, it could be even more so. Subjects aren’t necessarily equal in terms of the demands for marking students’ work, teacher pay, difficulty, or importance. (more…)

Student satisfaction is one of the main markers for judging the quality of education provided by higher education institutions, but generally speaking it isn’t used by parents or school boards as a method to judge the effectiveness of education at lower levels. This seems to go against what a lot of research shows, which is that happiness; satisfaction, has a massive impact on children’s attitude and approach towards education in general.

Student satisfaction can be an important measurement tool for a variety of environmental factors. It can be used to gauge the opinions of students regarding school resources, teacher effectiveness and the learning environment. It can then be used to check the progress institutions have made in their attempts to combat issues like bullying and the lack of inclusion some students feel.

To a degree, the lack of use of this important measurement is thanks to how we patronise students. We value their results way above their opinion about the education they receive, particularly in younger age groups. To an extent this is reasonable, but school boards could do well by looking into how they can include the opinions of the student body in their decision making.