Should I Delete That? - Teaching with Ms Whiston - BONUS EPISODE

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

In this special bonus episode in partnership with Get into Teaching, Alex is joined by Nicola Whiston. Nicola is an Assistant Principal from Stoke-on-Trent AND 2018 Math’s Teacher of the year. In this chat, Nicola told us about what made her get into teaching, the influence of social media on young people and her most memorable moments. Teachers are such foundations in our youth and this conversation got a little emotional so if you listen, are feeling inspired and are looking for a career where every day is totally different and every lesson can shape a life, then search Get Into Teaching now to find out more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome to Should I Delete That. This week's episode is brought to you in partnership by Get Into Teaching and we are joined by Ms Nicola Whiston, who is an assistant principal and math teacher from Neerstoke-on-Trent. We're going to chat to Nicola about her career in teaching, how different everyday looks about how varied the job is and maybe some. memorable moments. So welcome to the podcast, Nicola, and thank you so much for joining us. Morning, thank you for having me. So, I think we've both got snow this morning. Oh, no, you haven't got snow this morning. No, up north, we haven't got snow for once today. I'm quite jealous,

even though it looks really pretty outside right now. I know it's going to be an absolute nightmare. So that's fun. So, we'd love to jump in with how long have you been teaching? It would be, it would be good if you could tell us a bit about how you got into teaching what made you become a teacher what was the what was the impetus so i i think i've been teaching about 15 years now something like that i um i didn't go straight into teaching from university i did a year with the nine to five and the four weeks holiday that type of thing um but i always wanted to be a teacher i was just put off a bit in school by people being too nervous myself to speak in front of classes i was that student that didn't want to read in English or anything like that.

But I loved PE, and PE was what I wanted to do. And just, I wasn't happy. I just didn't feel like I was giving anything back or changing any lives, and I felt very office-based and restricted, and saw some getting to teaching campaigns, and they were actually looking for math teachers. Now, I was really, I was, like, naturally good at maths and liked it, and that's what swayed me to go into maths and give that a go.

So I just went for it and took a pathway in with a like a math conversion course, enhancement course, because my degree wasn't in maths either. And then this is where I've got to today. Amazing, and that was 15 years ago. Yeah, a long time now. That was like, yeah, quite a big shift and quite a big jump to make. But did you just feel like this is, I know that this feels right? Yeah, I just felt quite restricted.

And then as soon as I went into my teacher training, I just absolutely love. I loved it. I loved that each day, each day was different, even though there was a pattern and a consistency of lessons and routine, but you never know what you're going to walk into as a teacher or what the kids are going to say to you. And I love that. Yeah, amazing. That's so lovely. And so like you said, you teach maths. You're naturally gifted at maths. Good for you. I am not. You were math teacher of the year in 2018. That is really cool. Well done. Thank you. That was amazing. It was really exciting.

It was nice. It was more of a team achievement, I would say, because I was working in an amazing school and with an amazing department, but I feel really privileged. So, yeah, I am really proud of that. Yeah, that's so cool. Have you got like a physical award, like a trophy or something? Yeah, I've got a trophy.

It's in my downstairs toilet, which is just, I think it's the place that all visitors go to see at some point, so it sits in there. But do you know, as much as I loved it, the kids loved it, they loved that that was what they have. And sometimes I still say it to my classes, do you know, I was math teacher of the year. And they often remind me that was in 2018 and not anymore, miss is what they'll say to me. But it doesn't work anymore. It holds absolutely no stigma for the teenagers I have in front of me. Okay, so you need to like go for it for 2023. or 2020 for. I just remind them, once upon a time, kids, I was really great and now I'm the best

you've got in front of you, so enjoy it. So now you are assistant principal, which is amazing. Yeah. Can you tell us about that trajectory and how that changed your day to day? Yeah, so I, my career pathway kind of went from being a teacher to second in department to leading a math department, which was really successful. Then I kind of moved schools and within the same trust and became assistant principal for teaching and learning, so classroom practice. But that's because I love everything about teaching and being in the classroom and wanted to start to make a difference across school rather than just in my maths department.

So the difference is it, and it's sad in one way, you teach, like I teach less now than I used to, which I miss and teaching is my favourite part of the day. But what I really enjoy now is I get to work with all the new teachers into school, so the ECTs and I get to mentor them and help them improve and work with other teachers across school to kind of implement whole school policies and I get into more classrooms and I know more about teaching now and more subjects than just maths, which I think it's really, I just enjoy that. It gives them. me a wider picture of what's going on around a school. Amazing. That sounds incredibly varied, right? Yeah, it does. And I, like most people, kind of just went into

maths mode and for years, I was like, math is the single most important subject in this school. You will all pass maths. Now, I have started to learn a bit more about other subjects and starting to be able to talk to them about their other subjects more than because I just spend time in those lessons and start to get a feel for what's going on. Amazing. So, can you you talk us through, like a typical day of the life of Ms. Whiston and how that might look? Yeah. Okay. So I get into school about half seven and get all my printing done for the day normally, so that's all ready to go. About 8 o'clock, I go into an SLT meeting, so with the senior team and we just run through the logistics of the day. But by course past eight, my coat's on

and I'm down on the estate around school, down by Tesco, kind of clearing the kids up to school. saying hi to the parents, dealing with any community issues that have happened. School starts at half-eight and it's a bit of a corridor sweep, getting everybody into where they should be. Then when lessons are on, I will either be teaching or will be in and out of other lessons, supporting them with the quality of teaching in those classrooms, feeding back on what's happening around school. Every day I have a lunch duty, so every day I'm on Year 11 lunch. normally monitoring the ins and outs of the toilets and outside and checking their they're all behaving we deal with parents through the day as well so a lot of the time

our best route to challenging behaviour in the school is to speak to the parents as well so that's a bigger part of the day now than I would imagine dealing with students who are making poor choices and with parents to support that and then we get to the end of the day and I'll go down to Tesco duty again so tidy up the end of the the day down there, make sure everybody's going home and behaving, and then we will do either a meeting or a CPD, which is really nice after school, or some sort of enrichment, so maths club or there's loads of sports clubs and things going on in school as well. That is, that is a lot. Yeah, it is. My steps, the steps in this school, we normally get up to about 14,000 steps a day

in that little space of time. Definitely not a job where you have a low step count, but working in a school. Wow. That's mad. That is a lot of steps. Yeah, it is. Until you start to look at it, you don't realise how many there are. Do you, this is a, this is a big question and probably a very annoying one that, like, it's, it's hard to answer, but it's, it sounds to me that you really, I mean, I can, I feel like I can tell that you're very passionate about your job. Yeah. And is that, is that right? Like, do you love it? I, I honestly love it. I just, I would not want to do a single other thing. I love coming into work. I love the challenges that each day brings, but I just love the familiarity of the thousand kids that walk through this building who greet

you with a high miss or all right mucker or whatever little familiar terms you've got with each other. Even some of the more challenging ones who you know each day is going to start with a chase to the locker to put the trainers in the locker, but they still do that same routine with you every day and that's just part of their coming to school and you're greeting with them so I love all of that I love the little conversations and getting to know the like teenagers

as they grow up and I just love it all I honestly love it all on that is there like a moment a really memorable moment that was super rewarding to you about teaching that kind of that kind of like sticks in your

that sticks in your mind I think it's always child based. So there was a boy who, when I started in this school, he was in year nine and he really struggled, but they had maths every day last lesson and he just couldn't cope with that. So for all of year nine, I didn't teach year nine at that time, but he would sit in my office and I'd just teach him maths, basically to try and get his boy to sit in one place. And we kind of got to know each other over the years and I got to know his family and his mum was very poorly. And actually she's since passed away, which is really sad. But he is one of those things that no one thought he was going

to make it through school. He was looking like he was going to get permanently excluded. And then we formed this relationship where he would just be at my door every time something started to go wrong and we'd fix it. And he had sort of diagnosis for ADHD, I think, and they weren't sure if he had autism. But he just really struggled with school. However, he got there. And that last day, he actually struggled to say bye to me on the last day, so came back and it was that moment of like, you've made it, you've actually finished school, you've got some GCSEs. And like I said, his mum sadly passed away since then. And what happened was his big brother turned up on Tesco duty the same day his mum passed away to see me because I'd been with the whole family

and he just gave me, he got out of the car and gave me a hug and he's this huge 20 year old man now, the big brother. And I was waiting for this boy. I was like, where is he? I've not seen him. everything okay. And then he turned up three days later at the end of the school day at the front of school and just stood there like, you know, he's about six foot three and a boxer now and just looked at me and I was like, you just needed a hug and he just started crying and it's that type of thing. That's rewarding when you kind of get someone through school and then they've left school and the worst things ever happened to them that could happen and you're the person they come back to get a hug from. It's just, you know, or a hug or someone just to cry to. It's that

type of thing that makes it all worth it i'm crying i know it's they are great it's just great it's the the touch you have on families that you don't realize you have um but teach you to it to me i've got a daughter and i've got there's someone at that school that helps me with my two daughters as well and they they have a massive impact don't they on your family life totally totally i mean that's yeah that's really magical i feel quite emotional that's amazing and it's amazing to have that it's such a a wider impact like not just because i've always thought about it like teaching as you know just the impact on the you know the student who is in your class your physical classroom yeah but actually it's the wider impact of the family as well it's whole families yeah sometimes you see in school

good teachers keep families together as well because teenagers are hard and they're hard to bring up and they're hard to manage so if you've got another outlet at school where you kind of have sometimes i i've got a new he's in year eight and the way I rang his mum was hi mrs you know whatever your name is we and you're about to become best friends we've got four years now and he's going to last in school so I'm going to ring you every day and he'll be misbehaving so I'll sit next to him in class and email his mum while he's next to me you know so he sees that I'm talking to his mom and and this is because a lot of our kids have attachment issues and really attach to their parents and have spent a long time with them and schools are long time to be away from your parents isn't it when when you can just message

them at the weekend every time you want so yeah the I'm digressing sorry the impact you can have on families is is enormous it's not just what happens in the seven hours they're in school or six hours are in school oh my god that's so lovely to hear and you're so right it is like I remember being at school and like missing my mom's so and this was before mobile phones yeah thing so I could not get in contact with her obviously for the I don't know how I can't remember how long it's like eight hours that you're in school for and it felt like really really painful I kind of yeah Yeah. And phones make that a bit worse because if you've got that, they can, you want to be in contact just all the time immediately, but you can't be on phones in school. So then what happens is you create a behaviour barrier, which you don't intend to create. So it's being that link between a child and their mum if they're struggling with the attachment. So they're not in trouble for using the phone, but they still feel safe because they've got a link to that person that face this. Do you know what? I'd love to jump back to something that you mentioned at the very beginning when you said like you weren't sure about getting teaching because you weren't very good at speaking in class. You were one of the students who

was always nervous about speaking in class. And I wonder now, I was exactly the same. I was absolutely terrified of it. You know, like, head down, whatever there might have been an opportunity. And I wonder now how you deal with that in your own classroom and how you deal with that situation for those students who also feel like that. Because I guess I really struggled with that in school and I found that quite difficult. Yeah, I'm actually not sure if schools may be just a bit different than it was when we went to school. But the kids are quite happy to read out. However, we are very, I want to say inclusive.

So from the moment they walk in, there's kind of a no opt-out expectation in the school. And that's the same in a lot of schools where if we are asking questions, we work on it. There's a big agenda in school, though, and it's about personal development. So what we do in our school and in every other school now is it's about growing students, not just about, they don't just come to school to learn, they come to school to become kind of British citizens and you grow them. So part of our personal development agenda is building confidence in the kids to speak and have a voice and we run social action projects and youth voice projects and all of this.

And we have lovely things for kids who can't. speak in class like a garden school where they will go out with a group of vulnerable students and they have a voice because they aren't around people that they feel they can't speak in front of and so we grow them from year seven to learn to to have that confidence and have their voice heard that's amazing that is so wonderful that's really really lovely so so you say you're not because you're assistant principal now you don't do as much teaching but you're still in the classroom a lot yeah and teaching and I'd love to know less lesson to lesson, like it must be completely unpredictable, you know, especially with kids,

like adults are a bit more predictable, like kids, it's like hugely unpredictable. I wonder if you can remember a day where something happened that you just did not expect at all. I think the one that really strikes me in this current school, and that might be because I'm in more of a senior position, but we had a, the kids in my, in the kids in my, in the the community where I live, they struggle leaving their local area. We're very driven by sort of postcodes and things like that. And we had an incident a few years ago where a parent had said there's been an incident in the community tonight.

One of the boys has been hurt, but none of them are wanting to talk about it. So the next day when this group of Year 11 came to school, we had to be prepared for something that we didn't know what was going to happen. And we had a couple of different groups within the same. place. So that day felt really strange because what we had to do was split boys up as they came in and sort of talked to them about what had happened the night before and check that they were behaving themselves in the community and things. And that really rattles a school when some, you know, when we know what's happening before the kids know we know. But that's part

of leadership in schools. The kids don't realize how much teachers know what's going on. They think we're blind to it. So I think that was the unexpected because you never want to hear. We were worried. You know, you spend the whole night worried that one of your kids has been badly hurt and you just want to get them into school today to always head count and check you've got everybody you should have. So I think that's one of the days that really shook me.

Do you know, you realise that they're still children and they're vulnerable and you just want them all to turn up the next day, basically. Yeah, that must be hard. And yet another aspect, I guess, teaching that I really hadn't that I hadn't sort of considered I think it's from the outside it just looks like oh like you know teacher just comes into the classroom and teaches a lesson and like that's that's it but actually there's so much more to it is yeah and every teacher in the building or it might be just be a privilege but every teacher in every building I've ever worked in cares so

much about every kid that's in front of them nobody in these building just walks in clocks on teachers their lesson and and clocks out they they come in and they care about everybody that's in front of with them and I think that's that's the nice thing about schools isn't it and what makes them important yeah it's lovely on this show we talk about a lot about social media and I guess a lot of the thing the lot a lot of the focus around the harms of social media is on young people and I go I talk about I get asked about it a lot in interviews and on panels and I guess my experience I don't I'm not a mum I don't know any teenagers I don't really understand fully, I can grasp it and we've got some statistics of how social media is

impacting younger people, but I would love to know from you as someone on the ground and you know, constantly with young people who I imagine are constantly on social media, you know, day in day hour in hour out, probably. I'd love to know what you, you know, what your take on social media is um because as well i've learned that you use social media to your benefit with teaching so i'd love to hear a little bit about that if that's all right so i think it it i'm not a massive fan of it if i'm honest with kids and i feel lucky to have grown up in a generation that didn't have social media until i was basically an adult and and even then i've felt you know we've all felt at times how it can make you feel which isn't always great is it um but i think

I've used it in an educational setting and it's been really great because that is how the kids find information. So with them having, we had a kind of a school maths account that drove the students and showed them what they were needing to revise and put videos on for them and gave them little snippets and used it as rewards and they loved getting on the social media account and the parents loved it because it showed achievement. So in that sense, it drove achievement in the years.

I've used it successfully. Another school in my trust used TikTok amazingly, and the teachers do these incredible videos that, I mean, if it happened in our school, I'd love it. I don't know how they fit that in, but it's amazing that they do. And I think that's really current and shows teachers in a light that they are human beings

who can have a laugh and want to kind of get the kids to come in with them. I just think it's just, it's like an extra, it's part of their hand, you know, this is their default to have it in their hand now and, and just scroll, they scroll mindlessly. So it's that part of it that just makes me sad really about the kids' use of social media. So I do think it can have its benefits, but it's just something that's there, isn't it? And we just, it's our job just to educate them how to use it properly. We do a lot of work on. kindness and respect in school. And so I think they're the morals that teachers and schools can help, you know, put on to students and children, aren't they? And I think that's the key, isn't it, is education around social media. It's, it's there. It's not going anywhere. You know, we have to learn to adapt to deal with it and learn to how to make it as safe and easy as possible for young people. And I do think it's good to highlight the benefits of it as well, especially in school. I think that's really, yeah, that's really great. So if someone you knew

or someone listening to this podcast was thinking about getting into teaching, what would you say to them? What would you tell them? Oh, I love this question because my answer for this, and I say to every kid in school, it's honestly teaching is it's the best job and I could not imagine what I would do if I wasn't a teacher. It's really hard and you get emotionally attached to these kids, but they change your life like you change theirs and I've met so many people that are young people that will grow up and I know I've made a difference in their lives and they've made a difference or an impact in mine but I love it you get an hour a day in secondary school with each class and they roll in and they roll out and each hour you get greeted again and you get a fresh start

and I just love it and I think there's loads of room for career progression I'm I'm like lovely and ambitious in one sense and I don't feel like there's any limits in teaching. So I like that as well. It's not a career that starts and ends just in the classroom. There's so much more to it. There really is. And I feel like you've done a great job at illustrating that for us today.

And honestly, it's amazing what you do. And it's so clear how passionate you are and how involved you are in these children's lives and helping to enrich them. So that is really cool. Thank you so much for joining us today. And a huge thank you to get into teaching as well for partnering on this special episode of Should I Delete That?

If you have been inspired by listening to Ms. Whiston, I have, but I think it might be too late for me. And are looking for a career where every day is totally different and every lesson can shape a life. Then search, get into teaching now to find out more.