In your first year:

1. If you plan lessons, make sure that you plan one or two lessons a week meticulously to make them a good teaching experience. For the rest 75% quality is just fine. You will be amazed how well your lessons go if you are relaxed. The 75% planning might very often result in 100% lessons. No student will benefit from a teacher who is permanently stressed out.

2. Make sure you keep good records of your lesson plans and take 10 minutes a day to just note what went well and what didn’t. The following year you can fall back onto what you already have and just improve it.

3. Make sure that your lesson plans always include phases where students work and you just go round to help here and there. This, however, involves assignments that are absolutely clear to the students and leave no room for interpretation. This way you can give your voice a break.

4. Planning is important, but good classroom management is the core of good teaching. Be consistent – say what you will do and then do what you say.

5. Work together with other teachers at your school. Plan lessons together. Share worksheets, quizzes, etc. Offer your work to colleages, very often they are grateful, even if they have suggestions for improvement. This way they feel cooperation is not a one-way-street.

6. Always be aware of the fact that just because more experienced teachers don’t talk about problems in their classes means they don’t have any. Don’t think all the others are wonderful and you are not.

7. Look for a good teachers’ network on the web. I am sure that in the US there are loads of good quality discussion groups where people also share lesson plans. But beware: while it is a good thing to discuss school issues with other professionals make sure you don’t start joining the general whinge-fest.

8. There will be lots of things that go badly. or will even be desastrous. Analyze them, ask yourself or a colleague what you can do better next time, then MOVE ON.

9. Be careful with extra curricular activities! As a general rule, every second time you feel compulsed to volunteer for something – DON’T. Organizing something every now and then is just fine and it adds spice to teaching, but you have enough on your hand as it is. If you do it, make sure you are part of a team. Don’t let administrators and experienced slackers at your school cajole you into something you cannot handle.

10. Suggest that the staff in your school write a sort of “teachers’ manual” for the school. All the little things which have never been written down but are common proceedings in your school, all the important lists, phone numbers, unwritten rules, etc. should be written down. At my school I made one of those and at asked the new teachers to add what was missing as they went through the school year. This manual is already 80 pages thick and new teachers find it very helpful.

11. Ask for help.

12. Ask for help.

13. Ask for help.

As a newbie be aware that you need at least 4 years to be able to handle all the challenges at school.
The first year is just work work work.
The second and third year lacks all the excitement of the new experience but it also still lacks the professional routine, so these years are the worst.
In year four you will see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Flag this comment as inappropriate

Also, It doesn’t do much good to give a brand-new teacher only negative comments about performance without some good comments as well as support and encouragement. Also, administrators and supporting teachers need to help with supplied lesson plans and books. New teachers should not have to come up with new lessons every day with no help. Most new teachers don’t know to ask about those kinds of things, plus working phones in the classroom, working heaters or air conditioners, etc.

Plus, new teachers should not have to do extra-curricular work in their first year of teaching. Many are already working hours and hours after school just to keep up with paperwork and assignments. Adding other responsibilities to an already more than full-time schedule can make for disaster.

Teaching takes skill and time to acclimate to the school culture, parents, and kids, especially for brand-new teachers. School systems need to help them. Also, nobody brand-new should have to have a class with super-challenging students who are not working up to class level and who also have unmet emotional challenges and special education needs.

But, even though this is the way of things at some schools, there is hope.

Here is a website that I have found that show how teachers can get support while learning about teaching. Here it is:
(about induction programs) http://www.unr.edu/titen/sticpages/james/toolbox/Wong/wong-50,000%20to%20Replace%20Each%20Teacher.htm

New teachers, make sure you ask your new school the questions that Harry Wong suggests and you will find you stand a much better chance of success, because the school and the whole School Team will be supporting you and standing by you all the way.

Teachers who feel that they are unfairly harrassed or unsupported can check out the NAPTA site here: http://endteacherabuse.org/. They also have a Facebook page here: http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=19422198732&ref=ts

Flag this comment as inappropriate

Because I developed such an intimate professional relationship wifh so many of my colleagues, I was often the trusted confidant when they wanted to discuss their doubts as to whether or not teaching was the right profession for them. I always began our discussions with their reasons for wanting to teach in the first place. Why they were so miserable and what could be done to make teaching the positive experience and fulfilling profession they thought it would be? When it was a matter of learning some classroom management techniques or teaching skills, we worked on that. However, that was not the answer for all of them.

With this exposure to teachers of every description, I can say without hesitation that there are no invalid reasons for leaving the profession – if the reasons are real for the individual. Sure, perhaps a change of schools, a new start next fall, better organizational skills etc. might make a difference for those who really belong in the classroom (and they owe it to themselves to find out if they do or don’t) but there are many whose physical and/or emotional reactions to the demands of the career are real, and good enough reasons to look elsewhere. This is not a sign of weakness or failure, just a sign that it is time to move on to a new career path. With the great majority of people changing careers on the average of 2 to 3 times during their lifetimes, this is more the norm than the exception.

Having worked in private industry before entering teaching, and now a self employed career coach as my “retirement” job I can tell you that there are many wonderful non teaching careers available for those with teaching credentials, experience and the desire to feel you are “contributing something” to the world. Nowhere is it written that the only place a good teacher can teach is in front of a classroom in a school. For those who have done the introspection and still dread the idea of continuing a career in the classroom you owe it to yourself, your family and your students to explore all the options available to you. Unhappiness in one’s career always finds a way to carry over into his or her personal life. You and your loved ones deserve better than that.

Flag this comment as inappropriate