I fell out of love with teaching when
I realised I was teaching for an audience. Not the audience in front of me- not the students- nope, I was teaching for my headteacher. He liked to do something called ‘learning walks’ and they could happen at any given time with zero notice. And although this
isn’t such a terrible idea in theory, in reality he didn’t stay long enough to find out what was actually happening at that exact moment he flung open the door. He did a quick scan of the pupils, checked what was on my whiteboard, sometimes asked a quick question about the work and was gone.
The intrusion left me reeling.
It floored me every time. Not because I wasn’t teaching a brilliant lesson- I probably was- but did it look like it to him? Did he know that they were knee deep in a challenging comprehension or would he take the concentration and silence as
boredom? What if we were doing a competitive game of ‘I have, who has?’ that looks like absolute chaos but has every single student engaged? What about when my escape room set up left the classroom looking and sounding like a five year old’s birthday party with popped balloons and discarded clues everywhere? Would he know how many hours of preparation and planning had gone into that because I needed something special to reach my difficult class on a Friday afternoon. Or would he just presume I’d given up and let them have an actual party!!
Add to that many other factors and pressures and I realised I didn’t want to be in the job anymore. I really missed the autonomy we used to have. Closing the door and having deep discussions with students. Opening their eyes to the world through anecdotes
and storytelling. Challenging their points of view. Allowing students time to copy vocabulary rather than viewing this as a wasteful classroom activity. Freedom to stray from a scheme of work when it was appropriate. Everything wasbecoming micro-managed and after ten years teaching languages in secondary
schools, I wanted out.
IT WAS TIME TO GO.
I got a new job working for a private company teaching languages to primary children. I found my passion again. These young children took risks and were brave and uninhibited when speaking French and Spanish and that really inspired me!
I was fascinated by the role of technology in the languages classroom and how it can support learning and make activities memorable.
I began sharing with colleagues and my employer invited me to deliver training sessions and webinars to teachers in the UK.
I strongly believe that technology continues to have a bigger and bigger role to play in the classroom. The teacher will never, I hope, be surplanted by any creepy kind of AR type being. But we can do so much with technology as a supportive tool.
My virtual field trips are designed to whisk students to the four corners of the world with as much or little input as desired by the class teacher. This should free you up to facilitate, support, challenge, assess and all that other good stuff that makes our happy teacher juices flow.
discover my virtual field trips