There are few jobs more difficult than being a teacher, and fewer yet that are more important. It’s a career path that might seem mightily intimidating when you’re just getting started, especially when you consider that you can have a profound impact on your students that may affect them for the rest of their life.
Your first year of teaching may be one of your most difficult, but it doesn’t have to be overwhelmingly stressful. Here are a few tips to make your first year of teaching both rewarding and unforgettable.
1. Carefully Plan Your Year
Regardless of what grade you’re teaching, it’s important that you meticulously plan out your curriculum for the whole school year. Ultimately, your students must learn a minimum amount of knowledge by the end of the year, and if you don’t properly schedule out each lesson then your students might not be able to learn all they need to know by end-of-the-year testing. Consider using curriculum planning software to help you schedule out your lessons for the year.
Remember that there may be unexpected events that throw a wrench into your schedule—for example, bad weather cancelling a school day. Be sure to schedule in some extra days toward the end of the school year so you’ll have a little flexibility for those unforeseen events.
2. Embrace Technology
Resistance is futile—students of the twenty-first century are practically inseparable from their smartphones, tablets, and laptops. That’s not to say you should let them text away throughout an entire lesson. But you should definitely take advantage of your students’ interest in their devices. There’s a great variety of technological tools that can help your students, and we’re not just talking about word processors. Here are a few online tools that make for great learning aids:
- Google Earth: This 3D-maps app is a great tool for teaching students about history and geography, and it’s especially helpful for visual learners. If you’re trying to teach your students about the Roman Empire or Sherman’s March to the Sea, this app will prove much more valuable and interesting to your students than the 2D maps that are printed in textbooks.
- Socrative: This is a software that enables you to create simple educational games that your students can play on their smart devices.
- Grammarly: This is a virtual writing assistant that can help your students spot both spelling errors and grammatical errors, like poor syntax.
If you’re teaching younger students, you can still utilize these applications in the classroom—just bring one or two desktop computers into the class. Just be sure to put a web filter on them!
3. Mix Up Your Teaching Styles
As you’ve learned in your training, every student learns differently. There are visual learners, auditory learners, reading/writing learners, and kinesthetic learners. Because teaching can be so stressful, you might feel compelled to create lessons that utilize one specific teaching style that you’re most comfortable with. And while this is an effective way to keep down your stress levels, you might not be reaching all of your students to the best of your ability.
When you’re planning your lessons, do your best to change up your teaching style as much as possible. Rather than lecturing about Jane Austen, take your students outside and teach them a Victorian-era dance. Have your students write poetry—rather than just reading it—to help them understand creative writing. When you mix up your teaching style, you engage more of your students and you also keep yourself more engaged and motivated at work because you’re giving yourself something new to do.
4. Don’t Set a Bad Precedent
Controlling unruly students is one of the most difficult and unpleasant things about teaching. Be patient and don’t forget that some students may only be unruly because they’re dealing with things at home—sometimes teaching is a job that’s more akin to social work. Whatever you do, don’t set a bad precedent. If you let students get away with bad behavior at the beginning of the year, they’re more likely to continue that behavior through the end of the year. Better to discipline early and then make them love and respect you as the weeks go by. Don’t forget that you can always use humor to make disciplinary actions less frightening.
Furthermore, students (especially teenagers) respond well to being treated like adults. If you treat your students with a professional dignity and respect from the get-go, they’re also more likely to behave well.
5. Set Clear Expectations with Your Assignments
Last, but not least, don’t assign “busy work” for your students. Strive to make every assignment complement the lesson plan, encourage critical thinking about the material, and test your students’ knowledge about the topic. If it doesn’t, then you’re wasting both your students’ time and your own—after all, you’re going to have to grade all that busy work on your own time.
Teaching is difficult, but don’t be intimidated! If your heart’s set on teaching, then you no doubt have a passion for the profession that’ll help you power through all obstacles.
