Hello everybody,

I am interested. As student teachers, I realise that stress levels can be extremely high.

I was wondering what exactly is the biggest cause of stress.  Is it the planning?  (if so I have a file that may help you - click on my username for TES resource bank - or go to my website teacheractivities.co.uk) 

However, I actually have a hunch that planning isnt the biggest stress - is it rather the marking workload?  Is it the constant observations?  Is it behavioural issues in the classroom?  Is it the fees/lack of money? Perhaps it is the prospect of not finding a job - with this NQT completion deadline in the background?

 I would be quite interested to know because I am soon to be a PGCE mentor for my school and LEA and it is 8 years since I was a student myself.

What are your feelings regarding the above stresses? Do you see them as short-term hardships or does the future look a little blighted?

Thanks for your input in advance. Good luck with it all

I think it's planning properly which is the biggest stress for trainee teachers. Anyone worth a place on a course can plan a lesson. But planning the right lesson for those pupils, at that time, on that day is what makes it hard. It's what makes it hard for all teachers, not just trainees.

It's knowing how to take pupils from their starting point to the final destination, and what to do along the way to keep them moving in the right direction at at the right pace. Add to that the fact that you will rarely have a class of kids at the same starting point, let alone the same issues along the way or even the same destination and, basically, it comes down to planning and differentiation.

Not differentiation in terms of VAK, or thinking about SEN, G&T and/or EAL kids, but proper differentiation which recognises the fact that you have 20-30 DIFFERENT pupils in front of you. Having enough tricks up your sleeve to explain/ask/model/answer the same thing in different ways is, I think, what makes the difference between an instructor and an excellent teacher.

Which is why, I think, that having a stack of ready made lessons isn't particularly useful - no matter how much you may say to someone "just use them as a starting point". What's more useful is understanding the minutae of the changes a teacher makes on a minute by minute basis in the class, how they react to expected AND unexpected challenges and what they do to keep everyone moving forward.

Unless this comes naturally to you, the best trainee teachers are, therefore, the ones who ask the right questions of teachers they work with. And the best mentors (and not even just mentors, just any teacher who has a trainee with them) are the ones who are able to deconstruct what they do in a way that makes sense to a relative outsider.

MasterMaths:

I think it's planning properly which is the biggest stress for trainee teachers. Anyone worth a place on a course can plan a lesson. But planning the right lesson for those pupils, at that time, on that day is what makes it hard. It's what makes it hard for all teachers, not just trainees.

Spot on - bunging down a few episodes around a topic is the easy part, it's turning it into meaningful learning that's the challenge.

 Nim

 I have just finished my PGCE A-placement.  I can honestly say that the planning is not my major cause of stress.  I haven't tried to 're-invent the wheel'; there's too much other good stuff out there done by teachers who have the experience to know what works, and all of that is adaptable.

What I have found stressful is the stonewalling I have experienced when asking for guidance with paperwork and liaison with college.  I think also, for a lot of people, it's very hard to process the lesson feedback.  The entire course is set up to criticise you, and it has to work that way, but it's nice to get constructive criticism from someone who explains what they're saying to you!

joedurham:

I know what you mean, MasterMaths, but I disagree with one point. Having a stack of ready made lessons is enormously useful, as long as you treat them as resources to use in creating your real  lessons. A good teacher needs to concentrate on the important aspects that you point out (differentiation of needs, flexibility of presentation etc); they don't want to have to hunt for resource/activity ideas from scratch. For example, I think it is an excellent idea for trainee teachers to build up a 'starter bank' that they can draw on for ideas, based on what a particular class likes. Trainee teachers often try to reinvent the wheel, when the hubcap, tyres and bolts are already in the workshop...

OK, I see what you mean, and I think we agree - I just didn't word it very well the first time, perhaps.

If a trainee teacher is given a stack of "lesson plans" then the I think that they should look at the resources used, get a general feel for the flow of the lessons (especially if you take them as part of series and look at the whole series of, say 5 lessons, rather than the individual lessons). Beyond that, I think that the lesson plan is pretty useless - and, in the wrong hands, can be detremental as a lazy teacher will stick to it too much.

I guess it comes down to what you mean by a "lesson plan". My lessons are extremely thoroughly planned, but since I finished my GTP last year I haven't got a single written lesson plan to show anyone. Even during my training, my "lesson plan" was just something I typed up because I had to and so that I had something to stick in my folders, it wasn't actually a part of me planning my lesson. Yes, it reflected the main parts of the lesson, and allowed an observer to see that I did have a plan and was following it, but by the time I started typing it my lesson was completely planned. If we put it all down on paper, our plans would fill dozens of pages. Mine would include things like "see what mood Alfie is in as he walks in - but obviously compare this to the prevailing weather conditions and therefore whether or not he is likely to have had a run around at lunch time - and judge how to say hello to him and, directly related to this, whether to ask him to answer the 1st, 2nd, 3rd or 4th question." and so on and so on and so on....

That's what I mean about planning a lesson properly, and that's why looking at someone else's plan and thinking of it as anything more than just an overview of a resource can be very risky.