Teach-Primary-Issue-19.7

42 | www.teachwire.net Plan your year The big banner goals of the ECF are the core professional competencies that all ECTs are expected to develop over their two-year programme. The five key areas comprise behaviour management, pedagogy, curriculum, assessment, and professional behaviours. Each of these areas is then broken down into actionable tasks. In order to help you achieve these goals, your training provider will help you outline termly and weekly to-dos, and you will have regular check-ins with your mentor to ensure you’re on Y ou have survived your initial teacher training (ITT) year, congratulations! You are now officially an early career teacher (ECT). The next step is to complete your first year of the Early Career Teaching programme, where areas covered in initial training will be revisited in greater depth. You are no longer the fresh ITT turning up to school hoping for the best; you’ve done this before – this is time to finesse your skills and really shape the classroom atmosphere into a place where students can learn and grow. Your training provider will have an overview of what’s expected from you each term, and that will help you plan out your ECT year in the medium and long term, so that you can reach your professional goals and effectively transition from trainee to fully fledged classroom teacher. This may differ slightly for everyone, but one thing you’ll have in common is the ECF. Every ECT training provider must align their Year 1 programme with the Early Career Framework (ECF), which defines what new teachers should learn and achieve during their first two years in the profession. Find the framework at tinyurl. com/ tp-ECF You’ve GOT THIS Use your ECT year to build your craft and take the classroom by storm, with some simple but practical steps, says Katrina Quick of how you can achieve them across the term. Let’s take the autumn term as an example. You could use the following layout as inspiration or to create your own for spring and summer, pulling from the ECF. Autumn term breakdown Focus: building foundations Area 1 - Behaviour: Establish and reinforce routines to create a positive learning environment Actions: • Teach routines daily • Use consistent language and signals • Praise desired behaviours explicitly the right track. As everyone in the sector knows, teaching comes with a hefty workload outside of any professional development, so to help you keep your sanity, it’s a good idea to get to grips with what’s expected of you as early as possible. Here are some ideas I found helpful: Start with goals To implement the goals you want to achieve, I find it helps to break down the key areas into school terms, starting at the beginning: autumn, spring and summer. Within these terms, you can then create smaller goals and add examples