Classroom Tales

A year ago I had just finished my (hellishly boring) job at a call centre and was waiting for the PGCE to start.  I was anxious, nervous and unsure what lay ahead.  I can remember desperately wanting information, help and advice- basically anything to give me a bit of ‘help’ for what I knew would be a manic year!

A year on, after emerging from the PGCE alive and well (! ) I have come across lots of people who are now in the exact same position that I was this time last year and who too desperately want information and advice!

When I was on holiday, I decided try and provide a little bit of this much wanted information and to do look at putting together some form of ‘survival guide’ to the PGCE (and more broadly other forms of teacher training as well!) which I plan to make available as a free e-book, hopefully before the end of august.   My original plan was to include some ‘narrative’ (i.e. providing some narrative/information/advice etc based on my experiences and those of others over the PGCE year) coupled with relevant extracts from this blog.   This was the kind of thing I was looking for this time last year.

But then I remembered the hugely amazing #movemeon – a fantastic ‘cloud sourced’ e-book which is made up of lots of tips and advice for practicing teachers which were contributed by people on twitter  ( and is well worth a read if you haven’t seen it already) – and I decided it’d be great if something (on a smaller scale) could be achieved for new PGCE/ITE students.

So #pgcetips was born- and those of you who follow me on twitter probably couldn’t have escaped my tweets about it over the past 24 hours!

I’ve been asking people to share their top tips for PGCE students (including the #pgcetips hashtag in their reply!)  and I’ve had an amazing response already!  Thankyou so much to all of you who have contributed so far! (and so far, the ‘gold medal’ for most contributions has to go to @mathsatschool and @oliverquinlan )

The ‘master plan’ now is to create a e-book which contains the elements I originally intended, along with lots and lots of tips from twitter and the education community online – courtesy of #pgcetips .  I hope the book will be mainly made up of #pgcetips with a few other bits and pieces added. I also want to include (if people allow me to) blog posts from other blogs which are relevant.

I hope by doing this we can create a very useful resource for all those starting teacher training.

My other motive behind this is to try and get as many trainee teachers as possible on twitter and joining in with the wonderful education community/network that exists online. As I said here Since I ‘joined in’  twitter and blogging has been so useful to me and to my development as a teacher- and I know for a fact that I would have found things much more difficult without the support etc of everyone online!  I really want to try and encourage lots of trainee teachers to have this ‘experience’!

All of this- within the next 2 (or 3 ) weeks!

To help me achieve this, I could really do with your help in a few ways!

• Please continue to contribute to the #pgcetips hashtag on twitter- tips can be about anything that will be useful to a trainee teacher.   I’ll also be tweeting out asking for further tips in different categories (more on that below) later in the week.
• Please tweet out to your followers asking them to contribute!
• You can also contribute by commenting on this post (and please do!)
• Check out my rough ‘contents’ page which I have shared here- is there anything else you think we should include?
• Do you blog?  Is there a blog post on your blog that you think would be useful to include?  Please let me know about it!  Either comment below or msg me on twitter!   Likewise if you have seen one elsewhere but it’s not on your blog please also let me know!
• I’m more than happy to write the ‘narrative’ to tie everything together myself- but if you feel amazing and want to help write a section (and could have a draft to me by next Saturday) than add you name next to it in this document along with your twitter name and/or e-mail address- I am planning on no more than a side of A4 for most sections, just giving basic advice/information/tips etc- most sections will be much shorter!   There are some sections that I feel I may not be the most qualified to write- so please feel free to take a section (or two!) on!
• I am a bit of a loss of how to format this so it looks lovely!  Any tips, help, advice or software to use for this please let me know!

Hopefully this turn into a great resource for PGCE students!

Thank you so much for your help so far!

TH