Dear First Year Teacher,
Welcome to the first year of teaching. Have a blast. Your students and principal can’t wait to have a first year teacher full of energy and enthusiasm. Have fun and pay attention. The year is going to fly by. Keep a journal, blog or just take notes in your lesson planner because you are going to learn a lot. Here is what I wish someone had told me before I began my first year last August.
Try not to stress, and when you do feel stress somehow hide it from your students. Students and staff can sense stress and do not respond well to it. A teacher who has high energy and enthusiasm should balance that with a calm demeanor. Calm does not mean passive or lazy. Breath, walk away from tension, and take care of yourself. I am talking to you Type A, first year teacher. Do not be the first one in the building and the last one to leave at night. Go home, eat healthy, exercise, see your friends. Enjoy your life outside of school. It will make you a better teacher, I promise.
Focus on the students that are not behavior problems. Teachers and staff have a tendency to focus on the frequent flyers, the students who are acting out on a regular basis. Do not fall into that trap. Most students are wonderful: kind, hard-working, positive.
Speaking of focus, don’t put too much focus on students with academic problems and or parents who expect special accommodations for their student. Follow the IEP and accommodations plan but be aware of going above and beyond for only one student. Some parents scream for extra attention, help and communication with the teacher. Be careful, this is not always helpful to that particular student, or the other students in the room. Redirect your energies and pay attention to all of your students. The squeaky wheel should not always get the grease.
People can be mean. Don’t let this throw you off your game. Listen and learn from people who offer advice in a substantive and meaningful way. Otherwise, just tune the mean people out. Assume that their meanness will be counteracted by others in their life or the building.
On the other hand, when people give your criticism, and good teachers must have criticism, listen. Resist defensiveness and embrace curiosity. Remember: administrators, parents, teachers and students do not respond well to defensive behavior. Take a deep breath, put on your poker face and open yourself to criticism when it is given with good intentions.
Watch what works in your classroom and abandon what doesn’t even if your administrator, famous/successful teachers or professors say it is the best way to teach. Be a scientist in your own classroom and when you see evidence of growth: pounce. Take notes, look at data, listen to students, and repeat what you think is working.
Find a friend. Teachers don’t always welcome newcomers. Conversations with colleagues can be awkward, and you might feel like an outsider. Find the people in the building that are like you and make an effort to connect. Stop by their room for a chat or try to sit next to them during meetings. If your teacher’s lounge and lunchtime crowd gets negative, don’t join in. Be the positive teacher in the room.
Keep track of success and celebrate it with your students and yourself. Leave notes for yourself in your lesson plans when things go well and when they don’t. Praise students and yourself more and criticize less. Do not give students fake praise, but praise them for actual growth and achievement in all areas of school and life.
Be patient. Remember you have years to get better as a teacher, and students have many more years of school ahead of them. Do not think you need to help them climb the whole education mountain in one year. You are only supposed to lead them part of the way. They will make progress in your classroom and next year’s classroom and so on.
Some subjects are harder to teach than others. Don’t get discouraged. I teach ancient world history to sixth graders. I wish I had worried less about making it to a certain place in our textbook my first year and focused more on engagement, cooperative learning and critical thinking. My new goal is that my students are more open to the idea that our world is shaped by nearly all time periods, regions, religions, and ethnicities. Yet, somehow, the people of the world are more alike than different. The number zero was “invented” in at least two different completely disconnected civilizations at about the same time period and for different reasons. When my students discover that fact, I want them to say “wow!” That is a much easier goal to reach than hitting page 492 by June 1st.
Continue to love your students. This is not always easy, but it is essential to being a great teacher. Love them in the agape sense of love which to me means be present and open to their uniqueness in this world. Know their favorite sports teams, foods and how many siblings they have. Ask about their dance competitions, basketball tournaments and favorite video games. The more open you are to the person they are becoming the more they will surprise you with their capacity to grow academically and emotionally. Your classroom will pulsate with enthusiasm, engagement and energy if you keep an open heart.
And at the risk of repeating myself, have fun. At our end of the year class discussion, all my students talked about one thing they wished they had done differently in their 6th grade year. The answers ranged from not being so scared at the start of 6th grade, to reading more books in the beginning of the year, to reaching out to new classmates sooner. I said, “I wish I had had more fun with all of you.” Don’t make that mistake. You have worked hard to get your own classroom – now enjoy it.
Good luck and best wishes for a fantastic first year,
Heather Trees
Heather Trees is a TYT Tribe mentor and a sixth-grade teacher at Mazzuchelli Catholic Middle school In Dubuque, Iowa. She teaches social studies, religion, and language arts. Her greatest passion is inspiring a love of reading in all students. She believes there are no nonreaders just children who have not found their gateway book into a love of reading. Last year her 24 students read 437 books, many from her classroom library.
Teaching is a second career for Heather. She has a BA in theater and communications from Northwestern University and an MA in Journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern. Her first career was a television journalist and nightly news anchor at TV stations in Iowa and California. After taking time to stay home with her children, she began a career working with children in a school library, which led to her returning to school to get her teaching credential.
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