Dan Pearle began sharing assembly resources on Tes in September 2021 and has since supported hundreds of teachers worldwide with his One stop Assembly Shop. He was particularly successful within the first three months of uploading resources!
Tell us a bit about yourself and your teaching background
My route to teaching was a little unusual, during my University years I worked as a lifeguard at summer camps in Pennsylvania, USA with students with learning difficulties. After graduating, I ended up living in Canada for a year with no real direction as to what I wanted to do with my life. I felt myself treading water until I could go back and work with those students at the same camp again each summer.
I guess looking back it was obvious that I would end up in teaching, as I really enjoyed seeing the students become successful in a particular discipline (learning to swim in this case) and watching them develop over time as individuals. I was then lucky enough to be given the opportunity to train to become a Maths teacher in the UK, swapping arm bands for algebra, and have not looked back since.
I am proud to have worked at the same school for the last 12 years (having done a number of different roles) and have been in my current role as a Head of Year for 6 years.
Outside of the classroom I am a keen sportsman, and recently I have been lucky enough to become a first time father, which certainly has changed my perspective on life and has stopped me worrying about how to fill any free time!
What motivated you to start sharing your teaching resources on Tes?
The honest answer is that I was spending a disproportionate amount of my time looking for resources, namely assembly ideas each week.
I would spend my evenings scrolling through news websites in the hope of finding a story I liked, and then spending more time trying to link it to a value or an issue that I felt needed addressing for my year group at that time.
The idea was that I could save other teachers a huge amount of time and effort by uploading what I was creating, and enable them to personalise it to their Year group or school with minimal effort.
Why do you think your resources have been so popular with teachers?
I would like to think they are easy to ‘pick up and use’ and address values that all schools are looking to promote, or issues they are looking to address.
I have tried to make each one interactive in some small way, offering discussion/reflection points for students. I wanted to try and cater for different delivery styles, and ensure any resources were easily adaptable and were able to be personalised to have the biggest impact on the students they are being delivered to.
Each resource has clean visuals and enables teachers to talk around topics, rather than being word heavy. I also offer a ‘help with delivery’ document with each assembly, which gives any extra information necessary and gives suggestions as to how to deliver the assembly in (my opinion) the most effective way.
I think all schools share core values at their heart, and I have looked to develop assemblies based on these, for example attendance and punctuality, behaviour and positive social interactions.
Do you have any advice to give to new authors on sharing popular resources on Tes?
One simple bit of advice… think about what you already do within your role, and try to create resources around this, try not to create more work for yourself.
In my current role, I deliver a weekly assembly so the resources I am creating I am using. This also enables me to test the resources and think of ways to improve them.
If you would like to join One stop Assembly Shop and become a Tes resource author, visit our author information page here.