If I had to nail down in one sentence what I have learnt as an expat teacher teaching abroad in London for my first year, it would sound like this: “You do know what you’re talking about, but you really don’t know what you’re talking about and that’s okay, and also, you need to tuck your head in and stop trying to change the world, but also you need to stick out your neck and try and change the world and also your just learning but don’t forget you didn’t learn nothing at your four years of uni, but also you know absolutely nothing, but also trust your gut, you know what you’re doing.”
Does this not sound like exactly what the job entails! A mishmash of every job, which often contradict each other or requires the delicate balance of a circus artist who is trying to keep 7 different fine china plates spinning and a small dog balanced on their nose. This is teaching.
Are you interested in teaching abroad in Lond but don’t know where to start? Get the Teaching Abroad in London Guide to get everything you need to get started all in one place!
This is a hard blog to write about what I have learnt from teaching abroad in London because many of these have been learnt the hard way and sound negative. But just know that this is my experience and what I’ve learnt from teaching as an expat.
I worry that other teachers will take this the wrong way. But just remember that this is my experience. We all start at different places, even before we start our university degrees. And we all come to the teaching profession with different expectations, different bags of tricks, and different baggage. We all experience something different, but surprisingly, when talking to others who came to London as a first year teacher, I see bits of my experiences reflected in theirs. This isn’t everyone’s experience, but it isn’t just me, and perhaps by sharing these things, it won’t hit you so hard if maybe you experience them too.
This is more than just my experience of teaching as an NQT. I am an expat teaching abroad and not just anywhere, teaching in the UK; teaching in London. While this was my first year which would make me a Newly Qualified Teacher (NQT), I wasn’t an NQT. I didn’t get NQT time or an NQT mentor. I didn’t get any support as a new graduate. That was the price of teaching abroad in London during my first year; I slipped through the gaps.
A bit of back story to teaching internationally in the UK
In 2019, about nine months before I graduated, I hit that classic life anxiety about what I would do with my life. I am a planner and a dreamer. I like having seven plans in place about a year in advance that I simultaneously plan for and switch between. One day, I walked out of a psychology lecture and saw an info table about teaching in London. I definitely wanted to teach overseas, but I hadn’t ever really considered going to teach in London. I saw the table, paused and thought, “if I go talk to her, I’m going to sign my life away.” I laughed and walked up anyway, and that is precisely what happened. Within two days, I’d gathered my references, had my interview and signed up to the agency.
Here’s the thing though this wasn’t going to be my first time living abroad, it wasn’t even the first time I had made a snap decision to go overseas. It was, however, the one with the most notice. No one in my family was surprised, and it is super common for Aussie’s to live in London for two years. So it’s almost borderline, a rite of passage.
I expect that many of the lessons I learnt are very similar to many other first year teachers.
1. You need to go home – there will always be more to do.
I think this is pretty common among new teachers. This realisation that you could always do more. You could always leave more detailed feedback, spend more time working with your students in Maths, spend more time planning the lesson perfectly, spend more time finding or creating a worksheet that matches, or a PowerPoint slide that will help explain the concept better. You could spend more time involving parents, asking for advice from your co-workers or even just organising things for tomorrow, or cleaning the cupboard. But this simply isn’t sustainable.
The hardest part about learning this lesson is that it’s mostly about you. If you plan on your Sunday night, then your lessons will go smoother on Monday, and you’ll feel better about them. If you mark late into the night, it means you’ll have more time tomorrow to plan for that small group. We use this mentality to justify the immense amount of work we bring home, or how long we stay at school, because ‘it needs to be done’ or ‘if I just do this now, then I’ll have time to…”
But here’s the thing. There is always going to be more work to do.
You will never get to a point where you have done everything, where your planning is perfect, your lessons are perfect, and your students don’t need extra help. You just have to learn when you’ve done enough. As much as I love my students and want to do everything for them, I physically nor emotionally can’t. At some point, you need to learn to make compromises, to spend your time wisely. Perhaps the lesson doesn’t flow as well as it could. Maybe the lessons aren’t adapted, or my written feedback isn’t as in-depth as it could be. Everything in teaching is a choice, and you need to choose to prioritise you. My students deserve a teacher who cares, and I cannot care about anyone or anything if I am burnt out.
There is always going to be more to do, and most of it doesn’t matter, so you need to go home, Kirstie!
2. You do know what you are talking about – trust your gut.
As a new teacher, you are fresh with ideas, fresh with new ways to do things, and an index of everything you have seen work and not work from placements. You have your own experiences with kids and have had in-depth discussions about how best to work around specific issues. Yet the moment we become an actual teacher, it’s as if none of this experience counts as valid. Sometimes working with veteran teachers is complex. Now don’t get me wrong, it can also be awesome, but I know I’m not the only one who has an experience like this. Being a teacher in the UK, I felt this tenfold because I was in a new education system too. I’ve heard a lot of ‘you don’t understand, that’s not how we do it here.’ so much so that I started to question whether what was considered quality teaching in Australia wasn’t perceived as such in the UK.
Now I want to acknowledge that there are differences between the UK and Australia Education systems, different pressures and different standards, but not so much that collaborative learning or self-reflections were off the table. I needed to trust my gut more, especially when suggesting lessons for my students or interventions for my kids. I didn’t go to university for four years to learn nothing.
Even as a new teacher, I had ideas and thoughts that were worth hearing and worth sharing.
3. You have no idea what you are talking about, and neither does anyone else.
This is probably my favourite thing to say that I have learnt in my first year working in London: that nobody has any idea of what they’re doing 😂.. Now I’m not saying that nobody literally has any idea, obviously. The longer you teach, the more you develop your skills and knowledge. However, I think this lesson learnt is more a reflection on the idea I quickly threw out the window, that at some point I will just know how to do everything perfectly. I saw so many excellent teachers on my placements, but I only really got to see them for a snapshot. It’s different working day in and day out with outstanding teachers. You start to see what happens in the background over six months or a year.
I think one of the pitfalls of the placement experience is this constant striving for perfection. That every lesson you teach is being scrutinised and picked apart. And don’t get me wrong, there are so many benefits to this, but sometimes it becomes, ‘this part of the lesson was lacking because you are only a pre-service teacher’ and ‘don’t worry, you’ll get this from experience!’ which you definitely do! But also, I constantly make similar mistakes that I did when I was pre-service teaching. Sometimes I am in a rush, and I don’t give my students enough time to pack up. It disrupts our routine, and the kids act up a little bit, sometimes because I didn’t sleep well the night before, and sometimes I just get too wound up in the thrilling conversation we are having (this literally me every day).
Education is changing so rapidly. I mean, just look at the past year as an example; there is always going to be an element of not knowing.
There is never going to be a perfect lesson where there is never anything you can do to improve. One strategy that works with one child isn’t necessarily going to work with another. At the end of the day, none of us really know anything for sure. We just are developing a bigger bag of tricks based on research and our experience that have been refined over time. There is no perfect, and there is never going to be! You just need to try your best with the bag of tricks you have. And the best part is that this is why teaching is such a collaborative job. We are doing our best when we are doing it together! This doesn’t change no matter how long or how little you have been in the profession.
4. It’s okay that you don’t vibe with a school or an education system – you’re no less of a teacher because of it.
When you consider how many people leave the profession within their first couple of years of teaching, perhaps I realise that I’m not alone in this.
Sometimes discovering that you don’t fit within a system is a deal-breaker, sometimes it encourages you to develop change within it, and sometimes, like me, you realise it’s time to move on. Not every school is going to match your vibe, your pedagogical approach and/or your values. I worked at a great school where I loved the students and the staff. But the direction the Head Teacher was taking the school in, I wasn’t on board with. Not in a way that I thought they were educationally mismanaged or negligent or had the wrong priorities, but just in the way that I craved more things as a teacher than the school could provide.
This doesn’t make them a lesser school because of it, and it doesn’t make me a lesser teacher. I adapted my teaching and learning to fit into the school context. However, I still constantly reminded myself, no matter how comfortable I got (and I did, great staff members and great students remember!), long term I wanted something a little different.
There are so many different values and vibes within a school culture that it’s okay when you don’t fit within it. It’s okay to keep working there, and it’s okay to move on.
On the flip side, there have been schools in which I didn’t like. I did think it was educational negligence and mismanagement. This was hard. The students were amazing, and so was most of the staff, but at the end of the day, I am more than just a teacher. I am a whole person who wanted to protect herself as a teacher. We all know bad schools exist, and it doesn’t make you a better teacher just because you tough it out. It doesn’t make you a worse teacher just because you decided that you need to move on. Your capabilities as a teacher aren’t dependent on these things, and you shouldn’t let yourself think so. Sometimes you need to stick it out, and sometimes the right thing to do is to leave, and nobody else can tell you which is which. Every situation is different, and that’s okay.
I expect that wherever I work, I will have to adapt in some way. There is no perfect school or educational system, but I think at the end of the day, it’s about what makes me feel fulfilled as a teacher. When I feel like I am growing and learning and fulfilled in my job, that will probably be the place that I thrive most.
Teaching abroad in London as my first year wasn’t something I planned to do, and honestly, with covid-19 and all the change that happened, it definitely didn’t go like I thought it would.
But in this year of immense change, teaching full-time for the first time, being a teacher for the first time, moving abroad to London for the first time, then several months of lockdown, hybrid teaching, and so much more, I have grown and developed so much both personally and professionally. Being a Primary teacher abroad is something I hope to be doing for many more years to come!
If this is something you’re interested in, then I’m glad you’re here for the ride.
Related Articles:
NEW TEACHER Mistakes & HONEST ADVICE! (NQT Year)– Katie at ForTeachers
The Biggest Lesson of My First Year Teaching by Edutopia
15 Mistakes I Made My First Year Teaching (and what I learned making them) by A.L. Juliani
Interested in Teaching Abroad but don’t know where to start?
