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.

 

Fifty Lessons You May Have Learned This Year

1. If you’ll just listen to your students before taking action, you will avoid having to backtrack on many decisions that you had convinced yourself were sound ones.
2. Reinforcing good behavior is much more fun than punishing bad behaviors.
3. Parents are serious when they tell you that they would rather hear about a problem when it is small and solvable instead of a major headache. Don’t hesitate to call home. Do it early. Do it often.
4. It is crucial that you teach students how to do their work. They can’t learn study skills without guidance.
5. Asking students to tell you what they have learned from a lesson is more likely to elicit enduring knowledge than if you tell them what you think they should have learned.
6. Passing out materials can take forever and be a huge hassle until you figure out how to do it efficiently.
7. If a child misbehaves, sometimes all you have to do is move that student to another seat.
8. You have to give a rubric when actually making an assignment for it to be effective in guiding students as they make choices about their work.
9. It is always wise to think before you speak and to think again before you act.
10. Every now and then you should reexamine your classroom rules and procedures. Are they still working for you and your students?
11. Few students can succeed without your high expectations. You will get what you expect, so you may as well aim high.
12. Open-ended questions can be loads of fun for everyone in the class—including the teacher.
13. If you want to take a new approach to a topic under study, you can change the process or the product or both.
14. Document, document, document. Even the stuff that you think you will never need has a way of becoming necessary later.
15. Deeper understandings usually take longer to acquire. You can’t rush substance.
16. It’s important to laugh with your students.
17. Students will beg all week for free time and as soon as they have some, announce that they are bored.
18. Even young students need to be reminded of their future goals so that they will stay on task.
19. Learned helplessness is not an easy attitude to combat. It takes patience and determination and lots of time to undo its stubborn comfort. Be persistent. It’s worth the effort.
20. The worst behaved child in your class deserves your best efforts.
21. Determining the appropriate level of challenge in an assignment takes lots of practice.
22. Ask students to focus on essential questions and you will reap unexpected rewards.
23. Take a problem solving approach to discipline issues and you will be closer to having command of a situation.
24. The paperwork load at the end of the school year is truly staggering. Take it one page at a time.
25. Appealing to your students’ different learning styles can stretch a lesson to unforeseen depths.
26. For most students to consider work meaningful, they need to know how they can benefit from it right now.
27. For some students, a teacher is the lifeline to a world of possibility.
28. Students have a keen sense of fair play. They have an even keener awareness of unfair play.
29. Being positive about your school, your colleagues, your students, your classroom, and your workload beats being negative any day of the week.
30. Don’t hesitate to give a student a second chance. And hope for one in return.
31. When things are tough, remind yourself that what is bothering you probably won’t matter a year from now.
32. Who you are is more important to a child than what you say.
33. Three days is the absolute longest that a set of papers should remain ungraded and unreturned.
34. Teach tolerance every day. It takes a thousand small steps, but eventually they will add up.
35. Once that excited hum of busy students fills a classroom, you will find it easier to get out of bed and come back to school the next day.
36. Always have a backup plan. Your probably need a backup plan for your backup plan. Actually, having a file of backup plans is a great idea.
37. Teachers have to choose to do what’s best for their students, not what’s easiest.
38. Respect comes from the many small things you do in the classroom every day.
39. Teach your students an important life skill: to clean up after themselves every day.
40. Students need to be taught listening skills. Just a few minutes every day will make a big difference.
41. Sarcasm is an unfair weapon to use against a child.
42. Active learners rarely have time to complain.
43. No single approach holds all the answers. It takes a multifaceted methodology to reach every child every day.
44. If you smile at a child who is getting ready to misbehave, you will often confuse that child into good behavior instead.
45. Teaching, in order to be successful, must be a purposeful activity.
46. If you want to reduce discipline issues, connect with your students. If you want to connect with your students, listen more than you speak.
47. You have to create a reasonable policy about how and when students are allowed to leave the room and stick to it.
48. Teachers who can learn to accept constructive criticism gracefully--no matter who gives it--will avoid burnout.
49. Setting group goals is an excellent way to have students figure out how to work well together.
50. The ability to see the future in the face of a child is the sustaining hallmark of a great teacher.

Become a Charismatic Teacher

 

 

Who wouldn't relish the idea of becoming a charismatic teacher? Being the person who makes students feel so important that they would never miss your class or forget to do your homework or talk back? When you were first deciding on a career in education, the chances are good that you did not daydream about unruly students making your life miserable. Instead, you thought of all of the students who would thrive in your classroom.

    

Fortunately for the millions of teachers working in today's schools, classroom charisma is not a mysterious quality. The basics are quite simple. The tricky part is that you can't forget to work on your charisma. You will begin working on it on the first day of class and you will still be working on it on the last day of class.

 

Here are a few of the basic tenets of classroom charisma that you can adapt to meet your needs. Sart with the ones that you can manage with ease and then move on to work on the ones that are harder for you to manage.

• Your class should be about your students and their work. Make them the focus of your attention. Some inexperienced teachers make the mistake of talking about their own lives too often while ignoring students, who are quietly tuning out.

• Recall those teachers in your past who seemed to have that something special that made their classrooms an enjoyable place to be. What can you take away from those teachers that you could use know with your own students?

• Smile at your students. No one likes a grouch. A teacher with a pleasant demeanor has half of the charisma battle won. What if you don’t feel like smiling? Do it anyway. You owe it to your students. Remember that your difficult students are the very ones who most need your smiling support.

• Stand at the door to greet your students as they come into the classroom. You should greet your students to convey the message that you are glad to see them.

• Overlook what you can. Although it is certainly OK to be strict with your students, there is a fine distinction between a strict teacher and a too-strict teacher. If you spend your day quibbling over minor problems with your students, you will not have enough time to attend to larger issues.

• Early in the term, establish the procedures and routines your students should follow, and then stick to them as much as reasonably possible. Students who know what they are supposed to do and how they are supposed to do it are much more comfortable than those who are uncertain about what you expect.

• Laugh at yourself. While you should not be the focus of the class—your students and their work should be—you should let your students know that you have enough confidence to not take yourself too seriously.

• Make sure to eliminate distracting personal habits that might annoy students. Some of the most obvious behaviors that interfere with classroom charisma are a monotone voice, poor eye contact, sloppy speech patterns, and distracting gestures.

• Charismatic teachers talk less than their students do. Ask questions that will encourage students to share their ideas with you.