Preparing for the year seven transition

With year seven set to move to high schools in 2015, the coming months will be challenging for many current primary teachers. Here QTU member Sam Colbert draws on her own experience of sector change to offer a few words of advice.

I remember well my own sector change. On my first day at a new country school, the principal delighted in welcoming me to my 6/7 composite class. No, no, I hastened to correct him, I’m a secondary teacher. He shook my hand and smiled. “Not anymore, you’re not.”

Of course, if you’re reading this, your impending sector change won’t be quite so unexpected. Nevertheless, you may be feeling trepidation along with the inevitable anticipation and excitement. Take it from someone who has made the switch both involuntarily and voluntarily; it needn’t be such an epic event! Keep a few key things in mind and be ready to meet junior secondary as though you were born to it.

Assimilate. Get your Borg on and absorb everything you can. There is no need to lose your professional expertise as a primary teacher; indeed, others will be looking to you as an expert and will regularly seek you out for ideas and advice. However, there are many things that will be unfamiliar and you have to grasp them – fast!

Build your team. You’ll be starting out with several other teachers who are in exactly the same situation and you can be an invaluable support for each other. There are no prizes for going it alone and we all need to celebrate, commiserate and vent now and then. Talk out issues, innovate with solutions and become the architects of junior secondary in your school.

Participate with your whole heart. Start a club, coach a team, attend everything, dress up on sports day, get on the floor at the disco, decorate your classroom... The kids, big and small, will love you for it.

Work shadow the senior school teachers. Whenever you can, check out some senior classes or get out and about in the senior playground areas. It can be intimidating the first time you have to supervise a senior class or activity, and they will respond to you much more readily if you are a familiar face.

Hold on to your best practice. One of the hardest changes from primary to secondary is the loss of flexibility in your timetable. You can easily feel overwhelmed with having to fit every activity into a tightly specified time. It’s important to marry this lack of flexibility with those excellent activities and strategies in your repertoire. Collaborate with your team, be willing to compromise and pare your teaching down to those essential skills. Be prepared though, it will be a big adjustment.

The transition of year 7 to secondary presents a unique opportunity for upper primary teachers to step into a new sector environment while still teaching within their comfort zone. Make the move to make your mark on junior secondary education in Queensland.

Sam Colbert
QTU Union Rep

Queensland Teachers' Journal, Vol 119 No 6, 22 August 2014, p17