What I wish I knew with Alastair Heath-Robinson

Alastair is the most positive person you will ever meet and in this podcast he shares the most important things he has learnt from his own teaching and from training hundreds of new teachers.

He has had a varied career since university that has taken him from car insurance, into primary schools, then to being head of IT in a college, then back to primary, including 2 headships, and now he is the Director of the Colchester Teacher Training Consortium.

He's one talented man and he loves talking even more than I do!

In this podcast we talk about ...

• the importance of remaining positive and seeing the best in everything you can.
• how children have an infectious enthusiasm and a hunger to learn and how facilitating this is such an honour.
• why it matters that you understand the children you are working with, including their cultural heritage.
• how much easier behaviour management becomes when you have a genuine, trusting relationship with the children you teach and why finding something to like in every child will reduce, even remove, behaviour issues.
• the surprise of finding that the fantastic ideas you got at lectures didn't work in class quite as you had planned as you didn't have the skills to implement them.
• the stamina needed to teach for a whole day when you are trying to inspire children in every lesson.
• how you react when a child tells you he was late because his mum couldn't find the f...ing car keys!
• the importance of finding structures and strategies that save you time when planning and preparing.
• keeping 3 things in your mind when planning - what to recap, what the new learning is, and what are you going to get children to practice or apply.
• having a 5:1 ratio of positive to negative comments. And how this positive class ethos affects everything that happens in school and with the parents.

You can connect with Alistair on:

Twitter @colchesterttc