Teachers and schools needed a whole set of materials to help prepare lessons, and the British Schools Museum has a range of items that illustrate this.
There are the large ink bottles and ink pots (visitors of a certain age will remember ink monitors at school!). There are teachers' personal notebooks with their lesson preparation notes, and of course the desks with hinged lids. There are globes and maps, posters of British flora and fauna, and many books with instructions for teachers and pupil teachers on how to provide lessons.
For a large part of the Victorian period, pupil teachers were heavily relied on. These were pupils who helped at the school, but whose training and work was assessed. The museum has some pupil-teacher notebooks which are graded. This is slightly different to the pupil monitors used in the monitorial schoolroom who helped deliver parts of lessons among their peers; as Joseph Lancaster said, "He who teaches, learns".
