The ultimate teaching manual: a route to success for beginning teachers

Gererd Dixie’s handbook is written for new teachers and its content is well catered to its intended audience. The book covers all the essentials - from legal requirements to key pedagogy - and also provides useful advice. More importantly it outlines an ethos that puts the child first in every decision.

For PGCE graduates the advice may feel like yet another voice demanding more work. Dixie constantly urges teachers to do more to find out about each individual student, to know more about their background, to make more personalised provisions in their planning and to customise more tasks to preferred learning styles. Nevertheless, he argues that such ‘extra work’ is an investment that will ultimately make life easier, especially in the crucial area of behaviour management.