Engaging and inspiring teachers

Welcome to teaching, the most rewarding, challenging and exhilarating job that you will ever be involved in. You have just stepped into a world where each and every day will be different. Where you will realise, no matter how experienced you get, that no single child is the same and no matter how much you feel you have got ‘it’, there will always be more to learn. In my NQT year, my Graduate Teacher Programme mentor told me, ‘Amjad, some teachers have that magic “dust”, that thing that every teacher needs. They just get the kids and the kids get them.’ At the time, I took these words proudly. However, I am 100% certain that those words were, to put it bluntly, simply wrong. There is no such thing as magic ‘dust.’ What all teachers really need to know is how to engage and inspire their learners. Engagement is a word you will hear a lot of. In fact, I could easily argue that this word is used more than the term ‘learning’ itself! This makes it a challenging conc