Pros
>The staff at TeachFirst are quite supportive however 99% of your experience is not with them, it is with your host school. You don't pick your host school and it's a complete lottery. > I really enjoyed working with the children > All jobs I've had since think I am incredibly resilient and can complete work in a quarter of the time they expect. I've been recognised as a star performer and I credit some of this to my horrendous experience with TeachFirst. > I understand the importance of creating a fantastic culture at work as I have experienced the worst possible one.
Cons
> On day 1 my mentor told me that I was only there because I was "cheap". The school had recently fired half of the teaching staff. Although I didn't believe it at the time I think that the 'cheap' comment could well have been true. > At all times I felt like my subject mentor thought I was too much of a burden for her. I felt like she did not want to give me the time of day. Despite my repeated attempts to make friends, be helpful and be useful to my subject mentor I still was given the cold shoulder. It got to the point where I felt anxious to even go into her room. > Despite TeachFirst knowing about the problems in my department (an earlier participant had exactly the same problem) they placed me there anyway. > There is no work/life balance. I started working at 7:00am and finished at 4:00am (yes..AM) every day. I gave myself one hour for dinner as a much needed break. I forced myself to have half a Saturday off every week. I knew there must be something I'm doing wrong as I shouldn't have had to work all those hours but when I mentioned it to my mentor at the school they said "yes that's teaching. I have to put in that workload regularly." I doubted that that was actually the case but the fact that I was clearly burning out did not seem to be a problem for my department. The school were treating me as if I was a fully trained teacher instead of a PGCE student - I think that might be something to do with the way TeachFirst 'sell' the idea of us to the schools. My 128 hour week of work related things was broken up as the following: >19 hours actually teaching. >1 hour CPD >2 hours meeting a mentor (I had two) >5 hours recovery time (1hr every day.) (This was just a walk after the classes finished...I needed it) >57hours marking (this is 3 hours per lesson which sounds like a lot however that is just 6minutes per book per lesson and I needed to mark each question, set them a new individual 'yellow box' question based on what they've found difficult, mark last week's yellow box question, make lengthy individual comments on each student's work and record scores on my spreadsheet. Each book would be regularly scrutinised by senior management in spot checks. The first batch I could work faster than 6mins per book but the later ones definitely took longer as I was very tired. > 2 hours break time or 'before school' duties. > 38hrs lesson planning - See below for why this took so long. > 4hrs travel time to and from work per week. > Lesson planning - As a first time teacher with little prep time since completing my degree I first needed to get my head around how to convey the information to someone who doesn't understand it. This in itself takes a lot of time alongside creating resources, powerpoints and lesson plans. The scheme of work did not make sense and required the use of books that I did not have access to (I think it was an old scheme of work and the books had long since been thrown away). When I asked if I could look at a set of lesson plans based on the scheme of work so that I knew what to cover it was met with an aggressive response "Did TeachFirst not show you how to follow a scheme of work and plan lessons???". My mentor then spent about 20minutes of her time showing me how she would plan one of my lessons. That was very useful for that particular lesson however it did not solve my overall problem (how do I plan a series of lessons to match the scheme of work when the scheme of work involves books that I don't have?). Due to the toxic culture in my department help was less and less forthcoming so I ended up essentially guessing what the lesson objectives would be from the scheme of work. (Sometimes the scheme of work would simply be a title 'Fractions' along with the page number of a book I didn't have). There were teachers that had banks of resources and lesson plans that followed the scheme of work that they could use however I needed to create every single one from scratch. I was not allowed to look at other lesson plans in case I 'stole' them - even just having a set of lesson objectives I could work with would have been SO SO helpful. This method actually wasted both my time and my mentor's time as I had to present my entire week's lesson plans on Monday morning - after which I would be told why each one "didn't fit the scheme of work" and how I should change them. So I had to re-plan each lesson and submit them again. > No recognition for progress. For one example I got one of my Yr10 students from a low 'A' in the September assessment to an A* by the end of that first term. The response to this from my mentor was negative and framed as if I had ruined her Yr11 class. "How will we show progress now?". > Since I left, the senior leadership team of the school have since changed (twice, for various reasons). My old head of department and my mentor are still there though so I imagine the culture is just as toxic. >There are a lot more things I could write in 'Cons' but I'm going to leave those and make myself a nice cup of coffee instead.