The Art of Being a Brilliant Teacher

Real world teaching.

Extract from ‘The Art of Being a Brilliant Teacher’; Gary Toward, Andy Cope and Chris Henley

All three of us are coming at this from a real world planet earth perspective. We don’t live in some happy-clappy land where children skip into school with a grin and an apple for teacher. We don’t breathe in the rarefied air of Walton Mountain. Ours is not a rose-tinted world where Jim-Bob stays behind after class to thank you personally. ‘And I jolly well enjoyed doing my homework Miss,’ he gushes. ‘Those quadratic equations were life changing.’

We don’t live in an idyllic world where children arrive smart and refreshed, empty vessels that are ‘learning ready’. And ours is certainly not a world where every parent attends parents’ evening and they queue up to thank you for being the best teacher in the world.

No siree. We have both feet entrenched in modern Britain, where it rains a lot and children don’t always value education. Ours is a world where parents often don’t turn up at parents’ evenings at all, particularly the ones we really want to meet! And children sometimes turn up to class unkempt and un-breakfasted without pens and books. Some of the boys fall asleep because they’ve been up until 4am playing X-Box live with kids in Japan. And you get home, sometimes very late, exhausted and grumpy. All you want to do is fall into bed but you’ve got some marking and prep to do for tomorrow! When we out of our windows it’s not some heavenly scene of white picket fences and perfectly groomed children chattering excitedly about what they’re going to learn. The hot topic of conversation at the kebab takeaway isn’t the most useful French verbs. Oddly enough, in this day and age we have to persuade many kids to want to learn and work extra hard at them as they may not intrinsically turned on by school.

And that’s why this book is going to be so useful to you. It contains a wealth of information, some obvious, some less so. Some will be new, some will be a gentle reminder. But it’s about teaching NOW. Not how it used to be. If children aren’t arriving in your classroom ‘learning ready’, your job is to make them so. And, to be frank, that’s the hardest part.

Our message is that teaching is a demanding profession. But for brilliant teachers, it is also the best profession in the world.