Yesterday, I had a little bit of a crisis while I was on a tight deadline leaving work to make the school run. It had just started to rain and there I was, staring at my coat through my car window, pressing the unlock button with increasing ferocity in my efforts to open the door, get dry, and be on my way to school pick up. But nothing happened. The locking system had failed and, despite my best efforts to manually override the system, there was nothing I could do. I was locked out. And as the clock ticked towards the end of the school day, and I became increasingly soggier, I felt that familiar, cold prick of panic— how was I going to get myself out of this predicament and not leave an abandoned child* crying in the playground.
The panic moment is a sensation with which every beginning teacher is familiar. It’s the moment in Period 4 when the carefully planned video clip won’t play, or when you realise the lesson, you spent three hours crafting has met a sea of blank faces and total silence. It is the locked car moment of the classroom: you have a destination (the lesson objectives), a deadline (the bell), but the mechanism you were relying on to get there has fundamentally broken down. For a beginning teacher, this can lead to a sort of pedagogical paralysis. You stand at the front of the room, the internal unlock button jammed, while thirty expectant faces wait for the next move.
In the car park, I had to take a breath, think about possible adaptations to my plans, make some phone calls and run for the bus before returning later to try and sort out the problem. How did I feel afterwards – stressed and a bit harried if I’m honest. It wasn’t what I had envisioned for that day, but it got me to the outcome that was needed – a child safely collected from school.
In teaching, we often talk about the importance of adaptive practice, but we sometimes forget to teach the mechanics of how to adapt when you are in the grip of a panic.
If you find yourself in that moment of classroom paralysis, here are five steps to help get back on track to keep the journey going:
1. Narrate the pause
The silence of a lesson which seems to be unravelling may feel like an eternity to a teacher but to a pupil it’s just a few seconds. Don’t be afraid to narrate what is happening. A simple, “The technology is being a bit stubborn, give me thirty seconds to reset,” buys you thinking space and models professional composure. It shifts the moment from a failure to a technical adjustment.
2. Return to the WHY
When the activity fails, forget the task and remember the purpose. Ask yourself: “What is the one thing I need them to understand about the English Reformation in the next ten minutes?” If the card sort is a disaster, ditch it. Pick up a whiteboard pen and go back to the core narrative or the key concept. The vehicle (the activity) matters far less than the destination (the historical thinking).
3. Use your subject knowledge safety net
As we often discuss on the UoN PGCE, your strongest tool is your subject knowledge. If the planned activity hasn’t worked, lean on the power of the history itself. History is, at its heart, a series of compelling narratives. If you are paralysed, use your subject knowledge to tell the story, ask questions and support pupils to make connections. It can help to regain pupil attention while you take a moment to think about how to get back on track.
4. Set a holding task
If you need two minutes to fix a resource or look at your notes, give the pupils a low stakes holding task such as: “Turn to your partner and see if you can come up with three questions we still need to answer about this source.” Small pockets of time like this can help you adapt the plan or simply get back on track.
5. Pivot to good enough
Beginning teachers often feel they must deliver the platinum version of the lesson plan. When things go wrong, give yourself permission to deliver the silver version. It might not be the most innovative use of ICT, and it might not involve the beautifully laminated resources you made, but if the pupils leave the room having moved forward in their historical understanding, the lesson is a success.
Standing in the rain yesterday, I realised panic was not going to help me get the car open; instead, I needed to pivot to a different plan. Keeping calm to make adaptations got me to my destination – differently, but it still got me there in the end.
*For the record, my youngest’s school is awesome and would have cared for my child and kept them safe until I got there.
Becoming a History Teacher 