The Teacher’s Teaching Survival Guide
Five sensible habits that reduce workload, increase pupil thinking and make ordinary teaching considerably easier to sustain.
Good teaching is not a competition to see who can work hardest. Put your effort where it makes a difference, let pupils do the useful work, and stop solving the same problem twice.
Five rules every teacher should know
Remember these and a surprising amount of teacher workload begins to look rather less inevitable.
Stop unnecessary work
Before improving a task, ask whether it needs doing at all.
Give useful work to pupils
Thinking, retrieving, checking and explaining are pupil jobs.
Build routines
Do not personally solve the same classroom problem every day.
Make feedback active
The important part of feedback is what pupils do next.
Reuse what works
Create good things, save them, share them and improve them.
Ask whether it should exist
Teachers are very good at adding things: trackers, forms, spreadsheets, marking systems, resources and meetings. They are sometimes less good at noticing when the reason for doing them disappeared three years ago.
KEEP
It matters. Carry on.
SIMPLIFY
Useful, but heavier than it needs to be.
SHARE
Several people should not recreate it separately.
AUTOMATE
A template or tool could remove repeated effort.
STOP
Little changes if it disappears.
Make the pupils work harder than you
If the teacher is explaining, organising, correcting, summarising and answering while pupils watch, the balance may be wrong.
Preparing perfect revision notes
Make pupils retrieve, select and organise the information.
Correcting every mistake
Give pupils a model and make them find and fix errors.
Answering your own question
Wait. Let pupils think, discuss and explain.
Organising everything
Use pupil roles and routines for the routine jobs.
Replace repeated intervention with routines
No pen. Wrong seat. Books missing. Four pupils want help at once.
You can become extremely skilled at solving the same problems — or make them less likely to happen.
Starting
How do pupils enter, settle, find equipment and begin?
Getting help
What should pupils do before asking you?
Resources
Who collects, distributes and returns them?
Transitions
How does one activity become the next without a small evacuation?
Finishing
What should pupils do when they finish early?
Ending
How are work, equipment and attention brought back together?
Make pupils work harder than the marking pen
A teacher can spend an entire evening producing feedback that a pupil reads for twelve seconds.
The useful part is what the pupil does next.
Use common errors
Give whole-class feedback when many pupils need the same message.
Write the same comment 30 times
Your handwriting does not become more educational through repetition.
Show strong models
Let pupils compare, identify differences and improve their own work.
Give feedback with no response time
A beautifully written target is little use if the book simply closes.
Stop teachers repeatedly reinventing things
Before creating another worksheet, quiz, letter, PowerPoint, starter or revision sheet, look around.
Reuse
Use a good existing resource instead of starting from a blank page.
Adapt
Change what already works rather than rebuilding it.
Template
Create reliable starting points for jobs that keep returning.
Share
If five teachers need the same thing, five teachers should not make it.
Save properly
Future-you should be able to find what present-you created.
Improve
Make useful resources better rather than constantly replacing them.
Emergency workload rescue kit
When there is too much to do, the first response is often to work faster. Try reducing the amount of work instead.
Remove work before adding speed
Working twice as quickly is rarely as effective as deciding that two of the jobs never needed doing.
When workload becomes unreasonable, return to the five rules. Stop something. Shift something. Build a routine. Make feedback active. Reuse what already exists.
The five-question teaching sanity check
Before adding anything else to the lesson, ask:
What matters?
What do pupils actually need to learn?
Who works?
What useful thinking can pupils do themselves?
What repeats?
Is there a routine that would remove friction?
What next?
What will pupils actually do with feedback?
What exists?
What can be reused rather than recreated?
The teacher’s quick-reference table
When a familiar workload problem appears, begin with the simplest useful question.
| Problem | Ask yourself | Possible move |
|---|---|---|
| Planning is taking too long | Does something usable already exist? | Reuse, adapt or simplify. |
| The marking pile is growing | What do pupils need to do next? | Whole-class feedback, models or self-correction. |
| The same classroom problem keeps returning | Why am I solving this personally every day? | Build a routine. |
| Pupils are passive | What thinking am I doing for them? | Make pupils retrieve, explain, check or organise. |
| An admin task keeps expanding | What would happen if this disappeared? | Keep, simplify, share, automate or stop. |
| Several teachers are creating the same thing | Could one good version serve everyone? | Create once and share. |
Teaching Survival Card
SHIFT useful work to pupils
ROUTINE repeated problems
FEEDBACK = pupil action
REUSE what works
Put the essentials beside your planning notebook
The one-page card puts the five survival rules and quick questions onto a single printable sheet.
The PowerPoint gives the same ideas in a simple format that can be browsed, shared with colleagues or used as a quick reminder.
What is your teaching survival tip?
Teachers accumulate extraordinarily useful little habits: shortcuts, routines, phrases, templates and ways of making a difficult day slightly less difficult.
Share the teaching habit that saves you time, reduces friction or makes pupils more independent.
