A Day in the Life of a Nord Anglia Advisor
Imagine going into a classroom and seeing desks in rows, bare walls and children completing workbooks.Imagine you have the opportunity to change this learning environment: what would you do?
I'm a Primary Advisor based in a local school with about 300 children on roll. I work very closely with local teachers across grades 1-5. It takes time to build up relationships - teachers have to trust you and believe that what you are asking them to do can and will work. I've found that introducing new concepts works best by getting into the classroom and modeling best practice. I follow this up with team teaching and then observing, supporting and giving feedback when teachers have a go themselves. It's incredibly rewarding to see the progress our teachers have made in just 1 year! It is always paramount in my mind that the changes we introduce must be sustainable. It's important that teachers can eventually plan independently so they need lots of guidance and support. I try to meet with teachers daily to develop, shape and build on their ideas. Sometimes things get lost in translation so you have to be patient and flexible and try another way.
At the beginning some of the things I focused on were improving classroom management, positive behaviour management and basic classroom organisation. Amongst many other things I am now trying to develop differentiation, cooperative learning, and assessment for learning. Most importantly we are trying to do this through a practical based, thematic driven curriculum. We all know worksheets are safe and easy but our local teachers are beginning to see that investigating, exploring and just "doing" is when real learning takes place. The daily challenge is to find ways to motivate and support the reluctant or insecure and show them that it really can work. I manage my own time and focus my energies on whole school improvement as well as individual teacher's needs.
I get support from other Advisors on my team, my Lead Advisor, specialist subject Senior Advisors and through training courses provided by Nord Anglia. Our most recent inset was on delivering effective inset and proved invaluable for improving the professional development sessions we run for our whole staff on a weekly basis. I've been with the project for over a year now and I love it. It's very, very different from being a classroom teacher - instead of developing and improving just 30 young minds I have the opportunity and the challenge of shaping the future of a whole generation of young people. That's an exciting and powerful challenge and I feel privileged to be a part of it.