Teaching is not a career known for its balance: working terms are short and intense, and the holidays are relatively long and almost totally empty of official working duties. The message threads on your phone are a working history of this: your mid-term self is ‘Not free. Sorryy. [Insert classic teacher reason]’ or your holiday self is, ‘Hey do you want to go for drinks tonight or tomorrow or the next day…’ to which your long-suffering non-teacher mates will reply ‘No sorry. Got a massive deadline at work.’

The question I’ve been pursuing an answer to is: how do you manage work so that socialising isn’t limited to the off-timetable holidays? After some staffroom chats, spiced up with older-teacher anecdotes, I’ve compiled a list of tactics to add to bolster you in your pursuit of the all-important balance:

Often, the cognitive load for ECTs comes from learning everything for the first time and building many lessons from scratch, for which extensive research, as well as planning, is a requisite if you strive towards a knowledge-based curriculum.

1. Manage your own Expectations

In a good school, there should be opportunities to take on additional duties: this is, of course, paramount to gaining recognition as “leadership material” (in the context of SLT only. Good teachers are already leading.) However, an ECT needs to tone up and jump the smaller first hurdle of basic teaching skills. Their fitness for the larger ones is not yet developed to jump larger hurdles. Therefore, there’s no shame in hunkering down and just becoming a proficient, compassionate teacher who is a master of their field. Practically, it means you’ll get through your ECT assessments.

2. Timetable in your Planning

I’ve found the my teaching planner and the Outlook Calendar are my best mates here: I’ll have them open at the start of the day, so I can quickly eyeball what I’m hoping to achieve in my frees. It simply sets your mind at ease and stops you from falling into a mid-term exhaustion stupor.

3. Use the Urgent/Not-Urgent Priority List

I hate to name-drop but I use the prioritization list invented by President Eisenhower. It also has a very alpha name, which will make you feel like an Avengers hero: the Eisenhower Matrix. Now, I probably use a slightly tainted version, which I shall humbly call the Taylor-Einsenhower Matrix. It was recommended by my ECT tutor and goes like roughly this:

1. Write down all the tasks weighing on your mind
2. Create four subheadings: Important Urgent, Non-Important Urgent, Important Non-Urgent, Non-Important Non-Urgent
3. Under categorize your tasks under each subheading
4. Work through them starting from Important Urgent until (lucky you) you get down to Non-Important Non-Urgent

4. Ask Seasoned Teachers for Help

Honestly, at whatever opportunity. If there’s something on your mind, just ask them. They can solve your problem much more quickly because they’ve already addressed it. What I love about the staffroom is that you get teachers from every department, so throwing in a query means you’ll get some creative approaches you’d never have dreamt of. For instance, asking a Business and Economics teacher about low-ability Year 9 Macbeth gave me a compelling lesson idea in a 10-minute chat, which I’d never have envisaged. The lesson went down a treat.

5. Arrive 40-Minutes Before the Bell

This ol’ chestnut is tried and tested by countless pedagogues. You get there before the students arrive, make a coffee, monopolize the photocopier for a few minutes, then schmooze in, buoyed up for your Period 1 Year 7s. Now, this may not always be possible. However, if you take public transport into school, you can be virtually there, in the sense that people can now be working from their bedrooms. On the train, I quite often whip out my work laptop and start tapping. However, if you use this time to take a mental breather, then it is sacrosanct, and you’re doing your teaching a favour by keeping it clear.