Sam's Blog

Happy New Year! I generally enjoy the winter break, as it gives me a good chance to relax and finally sleep (and do some nice social things of course), but returning in January is always hard – the weather is still very cold, it’s dark almost all the time, and the first half of the semester to April seems like a long slog full of pressured deadlines. However, I have always loved the idea of New Year Resolutions – a chance to reflect on the past, and give oneself goals for the future. Here, I’ll write about some of the things on my mind at this time of year, and some of my goals for the rest of the 2024-2025 academic year.

Semester 1 Reflections

Semester 1 feels a little bit of a blur right now if I’m honest! I still found it a little tough to balance my workload with the actual time that I have to do it, and so thinking about time management and prioritization is going to definitely feature in my goals for the rest of the year. I have committed to the adaptive teaching approach for the year, which is definitely having great impact on the teaching and learning in my classroom, but maintaining my own high standards for how I plan and deliver lessons has been equally time consuming – so in the next half semester, I would like to look into my time effective ways of still delivering these lessons.

More broadly, I am still mindful of assessment processes, so I want to hit the ground running with some changes to how we are scheduling and reviewing assessments across the Secondary school. Additionally, review of curriculum is something I am keen to get started on, so I’m looking forward to getting to work with my talented HoD team on how this might look.

The nitty-gritty: getting back into the classroom with students

Despite the dark mornings and evenings, and cold weather (and if the current weather forecasts are to be believed, snow storms!), the thing that really does pull me back into school is the students, as cliché as it sounds. I could never imagine not teaching, so getting back into the room and pushing progress forward still is my greatest motivator in my job. It is important to get back into the swing of routines quickly with students, so here are my top tips for getting students back into positive learning routines:

• Have your go-to starter routines set up: for me, this is usually a verb conjugation ‘bell’ starter on the board, or a question we have covered before with a sentence structure to help students answer. It gets students thinking in the language again and gives a calm and orderly start to the lesson.
• Review the golden expectations: it’s never a bad time to reinforce high expectations with students, so I use my first week of lessons to review what my expectations are, and how students can meet these.
• Trigger curiosity: I like to begin new topics with a ‘hook’ of some sort (a photo, video, cultural artefact) to ignite curiosity for the rest of the topic – the new term is a good time to get this done!

What are my priorities for this term?

We have our round of mock exams coming up in January, so my next week will be spent very much planning for these. It can be tough balancing the message of ‘have a go’ and see with the want for students to take these seriously and learn from their mistakes, so I’ll be considering my conversations with students carefully.

We have semester data available, and so my inner data geek will be in full force for the next couple of weeks diving into the takeaways from the data. I led a session with our Middle Leaders in December which focused on using data for impact, so I’ll be looking to model good practice with data analysis.

There are two large accreditation processes that we’re going through, which requires a lot of high intensity, short term work – I’m genuinely excited for it, but equally daunted by the number of things I’m adding to my to-do list. My priority here is to ensure that we get the accreditation over the finish line (I am lucky to have an outstanding leader running point on the process), but to make sure that we don’t burnout as a team in doing so.

Finally – I’m hoping to get really stuck into the work I’ve been looking at on metacognition. It’s interesting stuff (and looks to improve student’s ability to problem solve across all subject areas), but I need to ensure that I am prioritizing time to sit and thinking about it. Luckily, my school are great at providing PD opportunities, and I’m scheduled to be on a course starting in January which looks at how to implement the metacognition project we’re working on across the school.

Personal Goals?

I know that I can tend to neglect my personal goals when I focus heavily on work. My challenge is that I tend to have a very high capacity for work – I have never bothered about working very long days and across the whole weekend – but that in the long run, I need to make sure I keep some personal goals in check…

1 – Gym routines – I love working out, mostly to listen to my favorite dance songs (!), but also for the focus it gives me; during a work out, I am carefully thinking about my form and technique, and so it is a great way to switch off from the busyness that usually exists in my head. I have always been a swimmer, but have been neglecting my regular swims recently, so I will be adding a weekly swim back into my regime.

2 – Reading – I am an avid reader, and have set myself a target of reading 40 books this year (I managed 42 last year!). Whilst maybe not the biggest amount, I love getting myself lost in a book. As a child, I was a purely non-fiction reader, and so have forced myself to read more fiction as an adult – now that I’m comfortable finding new works of fiction, I want to make sure a quarter of the books I read this year are non-fiction.

3 – Travel – I get lots of great opportunities for travel with my school, and have trips to Iceland and Switzerland planned with students. Aside from school trips though, I want to explore a little more of the country I’m in!

January can be fun!

I started writing this post before I returned to work, and then, well – the first week happened. I had a great week, and found moments of joy throughout it – and it struck me that January does not just have to be the post-holiday month, it can be a month of fun and laughter and definitely new beginnings. Have a great month!