Teacher Voices: Hannah Shelton

This is post number four in my ongoing series of interviews with former students.

Hannah Shelton (@HannahSheltonTT on Twitter) graduated from Plymouth University with a B.Ed degree in primary education in 2015. She now teaches Year 3 in a one form entry school in inner city Bristol, England. She says it has been a great learning curve as she found the autumn terms of her first year very challenging in comparison to her training. However, she had an excellent NQT mentor who supported her throughout and is now her Head of School (also a Plymouth University graduate!) As the months went on Hannah established herself within the school and she is now leading PE and Healthy Schools.

Hannah's Trainee Teacher Blog is well worth a read.

1) What made you decide to become a teacher? What/who inspired you? What were your motivations? 

I think it was my Year 6 teacher, Miss Mitchell, who inspired me to become a teacher. Looking back, she must have also been in her first year or two of teaching but it was the first real instance of my school life where I really wanted to please, and I remember loving all of her positive praise rewards with cuddly toys sat on the winning table and lovely laminated certificates. I continued to want to be a teacher because my own learning never seemed to be a breeze. I seemed to be the child that was forever asking a million questions to clarify my understanding which is something I now see the positives of and try to enthuse in my own classes. 

2) What is the best thing about being a teacher in a primary school? What gets you out of bed in the morning?

The best thing about being a primary school teacher is the fun! Being in inner city Bristol, my class is full of interesting, funny personalities that I feel make me smile no matter how stressful the workload is. I love the children’s drive to take on a challenge or work with their partner until they get it with that look of pride on their beaming faces. 

3) What does it take to become an excellent teacher? What characteristics do the best teachers have? 

Excellent teachers are those who know and care about every child in their class - that in itself engages and motivates learners. Moreover, someone who is creative in their approaches and ideas but is always looking to reflect upon what they are doing to improve the impact of their teaching. The excellent teachers that I have seen hook learners in with real life and motivate with a purpose.

4) What do you consider your greatest achievement to date as an educator?

I think my greatest achievement as an educator to date has been working with a child who came into my class with extremely disruptive, aggressive behaviour and low self-esteem, he really disliked school and his parent found it a struggle to get him in each morning. Through the year, we have built up his confidence with positivity, love and support, causing the aggression to diminish, happiness to reappear and love of school to form.

5) How can we improve education? If you were the Secretary for Education, what would be your first priorities? 

Reduce workload. The 60 + hours a week quite often stops me thinking about what matters, the children. Without schools’ tick box exercises of long marking comments, new displays each week and what feels like constant observations, I would have more time to rethink a lesson, target a specific group or just be more creative in my ideas. I think it is great that this has become such a talking point of late and that so many schools are changing policies to reflect researched benefits to learning. 

6) What are the most innovative uses of technology in education (that you have done yourself, or have seen)?

The best use of technology that I have seen is from my teacher training as part of the ICT specialism to my degree. Things like stop start animation used to write a story or to promote a theme gave fantastic ownership of the task and allowed the children to collaborate.  Once our school’s technology is updated/ fully functioning I would love to embed all of these things back into my classroom, but it definitely is difficult in such budget stretched times.

7) What is your favourite story or memory of teaching children you would like to share?

The funny spelling mistakes always bring a smile!

8) What advice would you give those who are just about to start out on the pathway to becoming a teacher?

Don’t be afraid to keep on asking questions, reading and finding out more. I am fortunate to work in a school where the staff are very close knit which always means I can pop next door or down the corridor if I need a bit of inspiration or have a question. With education always changing, I know I’ll never know everything and that’s okay. 

9) What are the most significant challenges facing education right now?

For me, as I mentioned above, it is the pressures of the never-ending workload. If teachers continue to work such volumes of hours just to get the bare minimum completed, then where is the time for creativity and imagination to really stimulate learners? Whenever I have a week where I have no SLT observations, marking moderations, intervention folders to create etc, I always feel that I have more time to re-evaluate planning and think even more about the children! 

10) What will schools of the future look like? What would you like to see happening in the next 10 years?

In 10 years time I would like to hope that our schools will be far less pressurised by making rapid progress and preparation for KS2 SATS. Our school is one of few Schools of Sanctuary in England, being a school that is committed to being a safe and welcoming place for all, especially those seeking sanctuary from other countries. The love and care that our school gives is overwhelming but unfortunately tests do not necessarily demonstrate that, schools should not be judged on these tests alone but look at the progress of the whole child. 

Photos courtesy of Hannah Shelton

Teacher Voices: Hannah Shelton by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.