Training to teach in school means you’ll get hands-on experience in the classroom.
It’s a route into teaching that gives you opportunities to put your training into practice right away, helping you to start your career with confidence. But it may seem daunting to step into the classroom so soon.
On Ambition’s Teacher Training Programme, you will quickly start to achieve your goal of making a positive difference to young people with the support of a dedicated mentor.
Understanding the role of a mentor
Mentors are experienced teachers who work in the school you’ll train in. We train mentors in approaches that will provide you with the best support throughout your teacher training. This includes:
- Helping you develop your teaching expertise, and what this looks like in your phase and subject.
- Creating a safe space for you to practise classroom strategies before trying them out in front of a class.
- Supporting you to build positive habits around your workload and wellbeing.
A mentor will also give you valuable insight into the context of the school you’re teaching in. As well as working with you to develop your teaching skills, your mentor can support you with any school-specific questions you might have and share their knowledge and experience.
Developing teaching expertise
Starting out on our programme, you’ll learn a range of new strategies to help you thrive as a teacher.
Your mentor will have the experience and expertise to help you understand what you learn during the programme, supporting you to apply it in the classroom. Together you’ll consider how to use teaching strategies and how you can make choices to suit your class, school and subject.
They will also coach you on lesson planning, with a core focus on putting what you know and learn about your subject into practice in the classroom.
Practising classroom strategies
Classrooms are complex environments, and it can be tricky moving from knowing what strategy you want to use, to using that strategy in the classroom. To help with this, our Teacher Training programme uses a method known as ‘instructional coaching’. This is a way of practising teacher behaviours – the things effective teachers do – before you need to use them in the classroom. Your mentor will also support you to understand when to use certain strategies and why to use them so you can understand the logic and evidence behind your training.
For example, your mentor might show you how to stand outside the classroom to greet pupils as they come into your class. This is a skill that’s easy to overlook but will be important in setting up relationships and expectations from the moment pupils step into the classroom. Through practice, it can become a skill ingrained in your everyday teaching.
You will practice this strategy in a low-stakes environment – this will usually mean a place without pupils present, with just your mentor there to provide support and feedback. This allows you to build confidence in your new skills before using the strategy with a class.
As you practise the strategy, you’ll receive actionable feedback from your mentor. Feedback is very specific, and might include where might be best to stand, or different ways of using gestures to emphasise your spoken message. Through practice, you’ll find that your confidence in your teacher behaviours - and yourself - grows. Your mentor will match their approach to coaching in response to your improving knowledge and practices.
The process of instructional coaching will help you to you to lock in those good habits so that by the time you try them out in the classroom, they feel like well-rehearsed routines.
Building positive habits
Your wellbeing is a core focus of our programme, and your mentor will support you to manage your wellbeing through your mentoring sessions.
Your school will provide time every week for you and your mentor to focus solely on your workload and wellbeing. These meetings will give you space to discuss any challenges or questions you might have about teaching, your training or being in school that don’t fit neatly into your practice sessions with your mentor.
During this time, your mentor can also help you to build positive habits, such as supporting you in managing your PGCE assignments and providing their insight into situations specific to your teaching and training. The habits you build in these sessions will help you throughout your training and can set you up for the rest of your teaching career.
Training to teach can feel like a big decision but on our Teacher Training programme, you’ll be supported every step of the way. The role of the mentor is an incredibly powerful one: they can support you to thrive in the classroom, set you up for a brilliant start to your teaching career and help you to gain confidence in your abilities to teach.