Things I Wish I Had Known My First Year as a Teacher

Although I have published this list in various forms previously and in several places, I like to examine it at the start of a new school year as I make my resolutions for the upcoming term. Being an effective teacher does not happen by chance. Instead it takes planning, commitment, and a great deal of reflection. As you being your new school year, maybe this list can help you have the kind of terrific year that you would like for your students and for yourself. 

1. Don’t be afraid to experiment and have fun learning with your students. It’s okay to fail sometimes.
2. Realize that you will have to prove yourself all year long. To students, colleagues, parents, yourself…
3. Being regarded as trustworthy is an invaluable goal.
4. There will be plenty of opportunities to learn from mistakes.
5. If you don’t spend time reflecting on your teaching each day, it will be very hard for you to improve.
6. There will never be enough time to get all of the things you want to accomplish with your students done.
7. It’s important to think about student activities in terms of small blocks of time so they stay on task.
8. Leave your problems at school at the end of the day. Balance is key.
9. It’s important to show students how to help themselves. Learned helplessness does not have to be permanent.
10. Take good care of school resources and teach students to do the same.
11. Use your personal strong points and teach your students to do likewise.
12. Be selective. Don’t fight battles you can’t win. Ignore the small stuff.
13. Focus on what you can change and get then get busy doing it.
14. Use a multifaceted approach when presenting material.
15. Don’t just react to a problem. Solve it.
16. It takes time to get to know your students and even longer to gain their fragile trust.
17. Make it a point to build strong relationships with your colleagues. You need each other.
18. Parents do indeed expect you to live up to their ideal of what a teacher should be.
19. If you act like a professional, you will make it easier for others to defend you when you make a mistake.
20. Paperwork must be dealt with accurately, quickly, and efficiently.
21. Patience. Patience. Patience.
22. You are a role model, ready or not.
23. When you teach students to believe in themselves, you create lifelong learners.
24. Don’t allow any student to be invisible. Draw them in. Build confidence and engagement.
25. Establish routines for yourself and for your students. Everyone will benefit.
26. Students need structure. They also need fun and creativity.
27. Get them up and moving. Active students tend to misbehave less than those who are bored.
28. Be prepared for class. This means having a solid Plan B.
29. Spend more time telling your students what they do right than what they do wrong.
30. When you make a mistake, admit it and move on. Teach your students this, too.
31. Be unfailingly positive. After all, if you don’t believe in your students, who does?
32. Students are far more concerned with the idea of “fairness” than you can imagine.
33. Set goals for yourself and work with your students to set goals for them.
34. Stay away from those negative colleagues. They will poison your day, your week, your career.
35. Ask for help. We all need help at times. Speak up.
36. Actively work to improve your skills and knowledge about teaching.
37. Create your own PLN. Use social media to reach out.
38. Volunteer for extra jobs at school with caution.
39. Work hard to let your students know how special they are to you.
40. The worst students deserve the best in you.
41. No one comes to school determined to fail—despite evidence to the contrary.
42. You will make a difference in the lives of your students…it takes time, however.
43. Ask, “How can I help you with that?” and watch the magic happen.
44. Say, “I know you’re better than that” when a student misbehaves.
45. You will have some hard days as a teacher. Plan ahead how you will manage stress.
46. You can’t ever predict how a lesson will go or what your students will do.
47. Laughing with students is a great way to build a community in a hurry.
48. Connections with students are vital if you want to have happy days at school.
49. A well planned lesson is the best discipline plan you can have.
50. Never, ever forget that you may be the only person who shows a student that you care.

 

The Problems with Being a Popular Teacher

It’s that bittersweet time of year for teachers everywhere. No matter when you head off to school, you will have to leave your summer days behind. Even if you work a full-time job in the summer months, your days are probably more carefree than they will be when you have a room full of students with diverse needs to shape into a cohesive community of learners.

It’s not easy to make the connections that will make every student become a valued member of the class. Creating those bonds takes time, energy, effort, and serious planning. The result is certainly worth it, however. Positive relationships between student and teacher are often regarded as the most powerful motivational force in any classroom.  

Unfortunately, it is very easy to misjudge what it takes to create those positive relationships. Many of us do. It is especially easy to do when you are just beginning your teaching career and are uncertain about the right course of action to take when you are trying to establish the type of relationships that will help your students be successful.

One of the easiest ways to go wrong when trying to connect with students is to become popular for all of the wrong reasons. In this excerpt from The First-Year Teacher’s Survival Guide, some of the warning signs that any teacher will want to avoid are spelled out for those of us who are already planning how to create the positive classroom environment that we want for our students.

“It is natural to want to be liked. It is a wonderful experience to be in a mall or a restaurant and hear a young voice joyfully calling your name or to look out over a classroom full of students who are hanging on to your every word. The problem with being a well-liked teacher is that it is sometimes such an exhilarating feeling that you are reluctant to give it up, even when you should.

It is much more pleasant to hear your students cheer when you tell them there will be no homework than to hear their groans when you give a challenging assignment. Choices like this constitute a teacher’s day. As a teacher, you should base your decisions not on what your students want at the moment but on what they need for the future. Students can be shortsighted; you should not be.

There are many legitimate reasons for your students to like you. Are your classes interesting? Do you treat everyone with respect? Are you inspiring? Unfortunately, there are many other reasons for your students to like you that are seductive traps; you must avoid these by thinking of your students’ needs. If you ever overhear your students make any of the following statements about you, you are becoming popular for the wrong reasons:

She’s an easy grader.

He’s just like us.

We’re friends on Facebook.

He never calls home, no matter what I do.

She never makes us do real work in that class.

We never have to take notes.

She doesn’t really care if we swear.

He likes to joke around with us.”

Add to Your Classroom Library with Free and Appealing Nonfiction

During a field trip several years ago, I watched my students pile off the bus at a rest area. Instead of heading to the snack machines as I expected, however, they stood around a brochure display stand, trading travel pamphlets and discussing tourist attractions with enthusiasm.


Intrigued, I began to gather brochures for my classroom. In no time, I had amassed a collection that students were reading with enthusiasm in their spare time. They traded stories about trips they had taken in the past and decided where they would like to go in the future. They discussed shopping at outlet malls in other states, dreamed about visiting the beach, and learned all sorts of offbeat tourist trivia. The pamphlets were doing exactly what they were designed for — stimulating curiosity and sparking imagination.


Over time, I have developed an even greater appreciation for these throwaway tourist leaflets. In addition to being easy to find, they are free. It is possible to pick up a class set with very little effort. They are not only brief, but also written to appeal to a wide range of readers with a wide range of reading experience and ability.


Best of all, I’ve discovered that travel brochures lend themselves to many different learning activities. And although my collection of travel brochures is still one of the ways I make my classroom as rich in a variety of printed materials as possible, I also now use them to help my students develop critical reading skills.


I begin this process by obtaining class sets of brochures about a specific place or attraction. I prefer to use ones that are about a place that appeals to most students because they will read carefully if they are learning about a place they would like to visit. Pamphlets about Disney World and cities such as Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and New York are attention-grabbers. Weird attractions such as alligator farms and anything to do with dinosaurs are also popular. So are theme parks, harbor cruises, petting zoos, and national parks.


Here are some of the questions I ask students to consider and be ready to discuss with the rest of the class after everyone has had time to read their pamphlets.

What does this brochure reveal about our social values?

What makes the brochure attractive?

Which methods of persuasion does the author use to entice people to visit?

What are some possible negatives about the place that are not mentioned?

At what point do you think the truth about the site could be exaggerated?

What sorts of careers do the people who work there have?

How did your ideas change from reading this brochure?

What advice do you have for people who want to travel to this place?

What information in the brochure did you find irrelevant?

How did the brochure appeal to your emotions?

Did reading the brochure change your thinking about the site?

At the end of our work with brochures, my students enjoy activities that appeal to their creativity. Here is a list of some of the more creative activities I’ve come up with that lend themselves particularly well to travel brochures.

Write a brief character sketch of the person who wrote this brochure.

Create a graphic organizer displaying the reasons why you want to visit the site.

Imagine that you have already visited the place and describe it in a letter to relative.

Use your imagination to add a new feature that would appeal to future visitors.

Create a budget for a trip to the site.

Plan what you would like to do there. How long would you stay? What would you do each day?

Make a storyboard to illustrate yourself on a visit to this place.

Invent a new feature that would appeal to visitors to your site.

Imagine that you overhear two visitors talking. Write their dialogue.

Collaborate with classmates to create a video clip of a typical day at the site.

Create a timeline of things visitors should do on a one-day visit, two-day visit, etc.

Create a comic strip depicting a visitor’s adventures at the site.

Write a letter asking to be considered for summer employment.

Like many other teachers, I have been dismayed to learn how little many of my students know of the world around them. Travel brochures bring the world to the classroom. If part of what good teachers do is enlarge their students’ lives, the practical reading material found in those throwaway leaflets can unlock at least a small part of the world around them.