New teachers need to quickly get to know school policies, students, teachers, administrators and most of all yourself. This article will focus on some teacher training resources and tips that quickly become overlooked during this adjustment.
How organized are you? Have you thought at all about how you will start the first lessons and what you need to prepare in advance? Here are a few thoughts for starters:
First Lesson – Objectives
Get to know: (Names: theirs – mine)
Create a classroom climate: this is how I mean to go on: learning program and ground rules (not too many)
Find out where they are at: writing? Test activity?
Start work: give out materials (if relevant), start into program and homework.
What message do you want to give out to your students. What is your attitude?
Example: This is me, this is what we are going to do. We are going to succeed, but it is going to take a lot of work.
What other things can you add to the list?
Preparing in Advance
Book: first unit or two: get to know. What do I need to supplement.
Supplementary materials:
Discussion, listening, extra reading, ideas for writing, fillers and short activities.
What other materials do I need: pictures, work cards, worksheets.
First lesson or two.
Find out: school rules for classroom discipline (if any)
School timetable
Year’s schedule (festivals, trips, events, test and report card dates)
Any obligations you need to be a part of.
What else can happen and often does?
A fresh new teacher might find that she or he is abandoning teaching procedures learned at a teacher college and back to sticking to a textbook and day-to-day survival.
It is also quite possible that a new teacher will get into a rut of routine things: stop creating or progressing. Boredom.
Another likely situation is a teacher might feel that all his/her energy goes into keeping order and classroom management and feeling satisfied when a class is orderly.
There is also a lot of pressure to conform from teachers, pupils and parents. Sometimes the ideas teachers learn from teacher college aren’t always practical.
A teacher might find herself/himself stop caring do like 'everyone else'. There might be the tendency to feel lazy to make extra efforts because it is easier to jog along doing the minimum, like many others do.
But what can you do about all this?
- Invest – the time, effort and care in teaching
- Keep learning: reflect, read, go to courses and conferences
- Prepare supplementary materials that you can get at easily
- Share your problems and worries with other teachers
- Do something daring: at least once a week.
- Keep records of successful things you did.
- Respect your students, other teachers and most of all, yourself.
- Keep believing in education as a worthwhile enterprise and in yourself as a teacher.
