All these things that I have done

Well, the first week is done and I'm really pleased with how it went. The kids seems lovely - a little boisterous but very engaged with their learning. I'd forgotten how much they learn in a year though - they seem very young to me right now! All the staff were really welcoming, which was lovely and I feel like it's going to be a really positive working environment. I've got two TAs to work with (one 4 days a week and a different one on Fridays) and *they* both seem nice, so all in all, I feel like it's been a pretty good start. I was very knackered by Friday - I'd forgotten what working full weeks was like - but hopefully that won't last. I also picked up a mini-cold but that seems to have mostly gone already, fortunately. Slightly annoyingly, I realised that I needed to re-plan English for the week coming up because half the class had already studied the book I chose, but it didn't take much work, so not the end of the world. Next week is baseline assessment tests, which should be interesting!

It's interesting, moving to a school which is much more free about how teachers run their classrooms because it gives me space to think not "what do I have to do" when I'm getting ready for next year, but "what do I want to do". It hit me again just now, thinking about morning work - I started off by thinking "what shall I do about morning work this year" and then moved on to "hang on, is that even a thing in my new school?" to *then* thinking "well, do I want it to be a thing? Was it useful?" It feels odd that should be the last thought rather than the first one, but that was rather how I got conditioned by the old place - we had a huge "must" list which I would never have had time to do all of, so it was about prioritising which things would be most visible and/or would take the least effort; what was most efficacious didn't really come into it. It's the same with displays - now I don't have a list of displays every classroom should have which is longer than the number of boards I have, I'm starting to actually think about what I want my displays to be for.

Then again, I'm leaning on the side of having morning work (tasks for them to do when they come in for registration) - it's a good opportunity for short burst practice of skills and it really helps get them settled and in a good headspace for learning - but that's because, having been doing it for about 6 years, I know how to make it work well. When I started, I found it of very little value and time consuming to prepare and I resented it, but that was because I had no real idea what it should be for, other than keeping the kids occupied, and so I couldn't properly select tasks for it. So the must list did have some value too - it pushed me to try something and work to get it right that I might not otherwise have done. On the third hand, surely that could have been achieved by better communication from the people on my SLT and leading my team about what the point was and what good morning work looked like rather than me groping towards it. I guess that's the whole point of me moving up to SLT myself now - can I help people to develop good/useful practice without descending to the must list?