Category Archives: Teaching

How to Become a PE Teacher?

If you’re passionate about sports and working with children, working as a physical education teacher might be the right job for you! In order to become a PE teacher, you need the right education and certification.

First, you’ll need to get your official certification to work as a PE teacher. To do this, you will need to perform the ITT, which stands for Initial Teacher Training. This will help you get your QTS, or Qualified Teacher Status. The most common way PE teachers get their QTS is by attending a university, followed by a yearlong training process to get their certification.

While at University, make sure to keep up good grades. Consider choosing to get your degree in a subject like Sports Science, which relates to physical education. Once you have completed your degree, you will have to take a PGCE, or Post-Graduate Certification in Education. This postgraduate training lasts one year, and after you complete it, you receive your QTS and are certified to work as a PE teacher.

Working as a PE teacher can be exciting and fulfilling, and once your training and certification is complete, you will be ready to get started.

Develop your teaching skills by volunteering abroad

Volunteering can be very advantageous to your personal and professional development. If you are interested in expanding your skills and knowledge, teaching abroad may be the perfect career change for you.

It may be worth discussing your ambition to volunteer and teach in a more deprived country with your manager, as they may be able to offer you advice on how to make it a reality. Many teachers choose to volunteer during holiday time, while others may take a year out to teach abroad.

Many volunteer teachers in Africa will have accommodation and food in return for their teaching. It will provide you with a new insight into teaching and the making the most out of the resources that are available. There is no doubt you will learn valuable teaching styles that you will be able to apply to your classes when you return.

Volunteering and teaching abroad may be the perfect career change you need, so do not hesitate to start planning you trip as soon as possible.

Becoming a teacher after being a teaching assistant

If you are already in the field of teaching by working as a teaching assistant, you may be able to develop your career further and become a teacher. There are many different paths that you can take to become a trained teacher, and one is through an apprenticeship whilst you continue to work as a teaching assistant.

If you feel that you want to further your career, you should organise a meeting with the head of the school to discuss your personal goals and ambitions to obtain the qualifications to become a fully trained teacher. The school may be able to offer you a deal, where they pay for your training while you continue to work as a teaching assistant, then once fully trained you will have a job with your own pupils.

To prepare yourself for the change of role, you could opt to lead some classes. This way you will know if teaching is definitely the right career choice before you begin your degree.

The importance of lesson planning

It’s always been important for teachers to be organised and thoroughly prepared for their lessons, but with more students per class, larger schools and stricter requirements from Ofsted, it’s more important today than ever before. Having a lesson plan, whether it be via an app on your tablet or an excel spreadsheet will save you and keep you organised going forward. With a lesson plan you can include reminder notes so you know where to pick up next week, whilst you can plan out the stages you’d like to run though before half term. You can break the subject down as you wish, but as long as you maintain and update your lesson plan, you can keep organised and on top of your students. We recommend you update this after every lesson, but of course you may have multiple periods meaning you’ll need to update the document or app at break time or lunchtime.

Going Digital as a Teacher

Today many teachers hand out tablets rather than textbooks but it’s not just the students who are almost entirely digital, the teachers are too. Every teacher is likely to have their own dedicated laptop, tablet and phone, and this is where they store all of their work. Being IT literate is not just a job for IT teachers nowadays, it’s a job for all teachers, and it’s important that they maintain their organisation levels on their devices, not just their desk. One way to really get digitally organised is to use different apps for different organisational purposes. There are apps which double up as diaries and mark books, can take simple registers and be used to record planning and assessment data. Don’t be a desktop saver, keep your important documents in specific folders, and make use of digital calendars to plan out your tasks and lessons each week.