Congratulations! You didn't make the 5 first-week mistakes that cause so many new teachers difficulties.
You are beginning to do better with classroom management, you have a good start on establishing a good rapport with your students.
Now you just have eight and a half months of day to day teaching to survive.
The following five areas are the teaching issues new teachers struggle with due to inexperience.
These are not mistakes so much as just areas that require practice, practice, and more practice.
Again, it is beneficial to talk to the veteran teachers.
Pay attention to which of your colleagues have mastered these areas and talk to them.
5 Troublesome Teaching Areas: 1.
Weak lesson plans.
New teachers tend to quickly get overwhelmed with school work.
There is so much more expected of them than they realized.
So many meetings, Open House, decorating the classroom, paper grading, and lesson planning.
And lesson planning is so much more complicated than expected-especially if the school expects lesson plans to be turned in.
In each lesson plan, have you covered the material thoroughly, in an interesting way, to consider learning styles, in a brain-friendly way, etc.
? As new teachers get more exhausted from paper grading and lesson planning, both areas suffer.
Papers don't get graded and lesson plans decrease in quality.
2.
Difficulty assessing the correct teaching level.
Having just graduated from college, new teachers tend to initially teach at a level too high for the students to understand.
It takes a long time to personally assess each students' abilities.
It is also likely that many of your students will have 504 plans or IEPs or whatever your local plan is called that deals with meeting every student's learning needs.
Just finding the time to read all these "individualized educational plans" is almost impossible; but not only must you read them, you must be sure that you are implementing them into your teaching.
3.
Pacing during the class period.
It takes several years to be able to predict with any accuracy how a class period will go.
Teachers (all of us) tend to plan too much.
It is also very difficult to know how long it will take for a class to do an activity.
One class might finish in 10 minutes.
Another class in 30 minutes.
If you planned for 20 minutes, then you are in trouble either way.
The pacing issue is especially important if your department requires every teacher is to be on the same section on the same day.
Getting behind is almost impossible to fix.
4.
Fears about dealing with parents.
New teachers often do not contact parents as soon as they should with discipline issues, not doing homework, missing tests, etc.
Feeling comfortable with parents is not always easy, but sooner is always better than later.
Stay in contact.
Make the parents your partners in achieving success for their children.
5.
Time management.
This applies to time management within the period and to properly using your weekends.
Learn to use the weekend to plan the entire coming week.
Yes, you will have to make some adjustments, but being ready for the week removes so much stress.
Talk to veteran teachers about ways they handle grading.
What shortcuts do they use.
(Secret: you don't have to grade or count every single assignment.
) Start developing routines for the mundane classroom tasks like collecting homework, passing homework back, taking attendance, passing out materials for activities, etc.
Your routines should include having students do some of the tasks, and should not interfere with your teaching.
(My routines for collecting and passing back homework didn't involve me at all.
I didn't touch papers until I graded them.
) When your have mastered classroom management, building rapport, and all of the necessary teaching skills, you will be a professional teacher.
I hope you keep working at it.
Our children need excellent teachers in every class every year.