New to Teaching? Friendly Advice for Your First Year
When you’re new to teaching, there is so much that’s exciting. You get to set up your new classroom, put your education to use, meet your first batch of students, impart a love of learning to future generations, and serve as part of a community, whether that’s the community at your school site or the larger teaching community.
But being new to teaching can also be scary. You’re responsible for 200 students while you’re figuring everything out. You’re overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work to do—planning, grading, communicating with parents, attending staff meetings. You read daily news stories about controversies in education.
People aren’t always encouraging when they find out you’re new to teaching. Steph still remembers feeling offended when someone tried to scare her away from the profession. Society isn’t always kind to teachers. And you may be concerned about teachers leaving the profession in record numbers.
But you deserve better than this lack of encouragement. Teaching is important: you have the potential to make a lifelong impact. You’re influencing our next generation of lawyers, teachers, doctors, politicians, inventors, and scientists. One kind word from you can have a real impact on a student who is struggling to make it through the day.
And teaching can also be highly rewarding. Planning a lesson that works just right, listening to your students enthusiastically discuss a piece of literature, seeing one of your students finally succeed at something they’ve been struggling to do, opening your first note from a student who found your class impactful. These moments make the hard work worth it.
So we want to welcome you today with nearly two decades worth of advice that we wish we had heard when we were new to teaching. We reflected on things we wish we had known, things that surprised us, things that caused us trouble, and, perhaps most importantly, things that might have better prepared us to last longer in the profession. We hope you find it helpful and encouraging.
8 Suggestions to Help You Navigate Teaching as a Profession
Preparation
Your teacher credential program did not prepare you for what you’re about to experience. Teaching is a job you learn in the moment, when you’re on your own with a classroom full of students. You still have a lot to learn, and that’s okay: you’ll one day be surprised at how far you’ve come (and it won’t even be that far away!)
Pacing
Pace yourself. It’s tempting, when you’re new to teaching, to sign up for all. the. things. Join a committee? Advise a club? Chaperone all the dances? Attend every sporting event? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. You definitely want to capitalize on your “new to teaching” energy and make a good first impression, but you need to find a pace that is sustainable in the long run.
Perfectionism
It is impossible to be a perfect teacher. Teaching is a job with wildly unreasonable expectations, and it is humanly impossible to excel at all of them. Figure out what only you can do and focus on those things. Discover what you’re best at and hone your skills. Choose one or two things to improve on and pay close attention.
Pick-and-Choose
You can’t care about everything equally. When you’re creating your classroom management plan, focus on 2–3 behaviors that bother you the most. When you’re grading, choose one thing to provide feedback on. When you’re planning, prioritize the most important things you want to cover and don’t beat yourself up if you don’t get to everything else.
Relationships
Build good relationships with support staff. Build good relationships with special education case carriers, the school librarian, the office manager, and the custodian. These are the people who quietly make the school run, and when they like you, your job is much easier.
Office Politics
Be wise as you build relationships with colleagues. Strive to get along with everyone, but be aware that school staffs can be full of politics, and until you’ve figured those out, it’s wise to be selective in what you share, especially if it’s something that could make you look bad.
Advice
Ask for advice. Steph was in Kate’s room all. the. time. her first year, asking questions about big things and small things. You’re new, you have a lot to learn, and the other teachers on your campus have a lot of wisdom to offer. It is, however, also okay to ignore that advice. Every teacher has their own style, and what works for one teacher won’t work for everyone.
Professional Learning Communities
Contribute to your Professional Learning Community. You’re new and overwhelmed, and your PLC will likely be a great support. But try to contribute where you can: participate in discussions, offer to create something, ask a clarifying question, or share something that worked well in your classroom.
14 Tips for Planning When You’re New to Teaching
Tip #1
Allow yourself to just figure it out. Steph distinctly remembers getting to the end of her first year and thinking, “Ohhhhh, I get it now.” (And she had the same thought when she first taught AP Seminar fifteen years in, and she already knows she’s going to have the same thought at the end of this year teaching AP Research). Don’t worry about being “the best.” Learn the curriculum, make notes about what works and what doesn’t, and collect a baseline to improve upon next year.
Tip #2
Keep backward planning. That long-form lesson plan you completed in your credential program? You won’t be needing that. But backward planning is essential. Have a general outline for your year and for each unit. Decide what students will need to do or know at the end of each unit and proceed from there. This helps you focus on what’s most important and avoid embarrassing mistakes like running out of time to finish a novel.
Tip #3
Trust that you’re (probably) not doing permanent harm to your students. Did your students read this year? Did they write? Did you have a meaningful interaction or two? Then your students got something out of your class. You are one teacher among many in their academic careers, and it’s unlikely that you’ve ruined their futures if you messed up a lesson or had to skip or cut short a unit.
Tip #4
Experiment! Good teachers are always trying new things, but your first year in particular is the time to see what works for you and develop your teaching style. You learned a lot of strategies in your credential program, but not all of them will work for you (confession: we never found our groove with Socratic Seminars, and Kate has a traumatic history with journaling). Sometimes, you also need to learn why something doesn’t work for yourself instead of taking someone’s word for it (see Steph’s experiment with table groups despite Kate’s well-intentioned advice). And that’s okay!
Tip #5
Stay at least a week ahead. When you’re figuring things out for the first time, you probably feel like you’re hanging on by your fingernails. But if you can stay a week (or even three days) ahead of your students, you’ll feel more comfortable, you’ll avoid the panic of a broken copier five minutes before your class starts, and you’ll be able to guide students in the right direction because you already know where you’re going.
Tip #6
Your students will know less than you expect them to. What you assume is “common knowledge,” skills you picked up naturally, even what the curriculum map says students “should know”? Anticipate that your students will need at least a review and possibly to learn these things for the first time (or even “for the first time,” wink wink).
Tip #7
Stick to your lesson plans unless students are lost. If you’ve overplanned the number of practice activities or your Shakespeare background presentation is taking twice as long as you expected, do your best to get back on track. But if your students are lost, slow down, reconfigure your plans, and make sure they’ve got it. If the only person who makes it to the end of the lesson, unit, semester, or year is YOU, that’s not a good thing.
Tip #8
Students need structure, deadlines, and clear directions. Some students lack the study skills we would anticipate they have surely learned by high school. Some students will struggle with the freedom to make decisions or the opportunity to demonstrate personal responsibility that they have surely “earned” by this point in their academic careers. Some will do the bare minimum if you don’t specify otherwise. The more you provide students with structure, deadlines, and clear directions, the better your results will be.
Tip #9
Don’t expect your students will like reading. Many of us became English teachers because we love to read, and we can’t wait to develop a love of reading in our students. Unfortunately, many of our students would rather do anything but read, and even when we do our best to cultivate a love of reading, our efforts may only resonate with a handful of students.
Tip #10
Making time for independent reading is still worth it. When we were new to teaching, we were so overwhelmed by all the things we had to cover that we didn’t make independent reading a priority. But as pressures on students increase, screen time goes up, and attention spans go down, we came to see how necessary it is to make space for reading in our classrooms.
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Tip #11
Don’t expect your students will do their homework. Some students will never do homework, some will copy it at lunch, and some will give it a superficial pass. Whether you still want to assign homework is up to you, but if your lesson plan is entirely dependent on students having read on their own, you’re in for a rough day. Build your lessons with this assumption in mind, and consider saving “must-have” activities for class time.
Tip #12
Assigning short writing assignments frequently is more manageable than assigning full essays infrequently. While writing is one of the most important things we have to teach, it’s also one of the hardest. It is also the most time-consuming thing to grade and provide feedback on, a necessity for helping students improve. Consider assigning paragraphs and reinforcing writing strategies in short-answer responses on a regular basis—your students will get more practice without creating an impossible grading load for you.
Tip #13
If you assign a lot of personal writing, you will have to contact a counselor and/or Child Protective Services at some point. Many of our students deal with tough things in their personal lives, and writing assignments may be the only place they have to process them. This isn’t a reason not to assign personal writing, but it’s good to be aware of the likelihood that you’ll have to deal with tough confessions. We wish someone had warned us.
Tip #14
If you find it easily on Google, they can, too. Thankfully, there is an abundance of resources online for teachers. But not all of these resources are behind paywalls, so remember that if you use something from the first page of Google search results or the answer key is clearly posted online, your students can and will find it. That doesn’t mean those resources aren’t worth using, but you may want to be more thoughtful about how you use them.
3 Reminders When You’re in Front of the Classroom
Reminder #1
It’s okay not to have all the answers. It can be intimidating to have a student ask a question we don’t have the answer to (especially when we’re teaching advanced and honors courses). But it’s impossible for one human to know everything, so be willing to acknowledge this to your students and seek out the answers together.
Reminder #2
Have a couple go-to strategies ready if your lesson doesn’t take as long as you expected it to. One thing you’re learning in your first year is how to pace yourself—how long it takes students to complete an assignment, how long it takes you to get through a lecture, how much will students have to say in a discussion. When you’re new to teaching, it can be nerve-wracking to finish 10 minutes early and downright terrifying to finish 20–30 minutes before the bell rings. Our favorite go-to was a set of flashcards with literary terms and students’ vocabulary words that we could go through whenever we finished early, but you can also play word games, pull out a stash of icebreaker questions, or require students to have an independent reading book.
Reminder #3
If you make time for independent reading, you should read, too. We have a lot to do as teachers, so it’s tempting to use every second that students are working to tackle our to-do list. But if we want our students to learn the value of reading, we have to show them that we also value reading. If we tell them it’s important but then use silent reading time to grade papers and answer emails, we’re undercutting our message and they’ll think it’s okay for them to use the time to finish their math homework.
7 Classroom Management Tips When You’re New to Teaching
Emotions
Don’t let students know they got to you. Teenagers can be unkind, and when you’re overwhelmed, a negative interaction with a student can push you over the edge. Do your best to save your emotional reactions for after students have left (especially if you feel tears coming). When students know they’ve gotten to you, they’re more likely to do it again.
Balance
Build relationships wisely. Be kind but not overly friendly and familiar. Being too strict often leads to pushback while being too friendly tells students they can walk all over you. Think like Goldilocks and aim for the middle.
Boundaries
Expect your students to push boundaries. If you don’t set clear boundaries and then enforce them, students will take advantage, whether this is with technology use, your tardy policy, or even kind things like allowing students to eat lunch in your classroom. It’s easy to see things spin wildly out of control.
Cheating
Expect that your students will cheat or fail to meet your expectations. New teachers are often devastated to see that their students did a poor job on an assignment, cheated on a test, or plagiarized an essay. It’s discouraging to pour time and effort into something only to see students blow it off, but this is a common experience (so be prepared) and has little to do with you.
Behavior
Don’t take students’ behavior personally. It’s so easy to be hurt or offended when a student acts out. But in most cases, they’re acting out against your role as “the teacher,” not intending to hurt you as an individual. Remember that they don’t even really know you as a person. Doing so will make it easier to calmly manage classroom behavior and not let it ruin your day.
Gossip
Know that students gossip and have a cell phone in easy reach. Students can and will repeat things that you say to other students and teachers, and it’s easier than ever to discreetly capture classroom interactions on video. Do your best not to do (or say) something that you wouldn’t want other teachers or your principal to hear; instead, teach as if you’re being observed.
Empathy
Have empathy for your students. Teenagers know how to push buttons, and when you’re trying to deal with a stressful job, it’s so easy to view them as the antagonist in your story. But being a teenager is tough: you’re full of hormones, you feel like everyone is watching and judging you, you have to learn all kinds of complex things and make important decisions, and you may be dealing with personal and family challenges. When we remember this, it’s easier to build positive relationships with students, which is the key to effective classroom management.
3 Reminders to Take Care of Yourself When You’re New to Teaching
Reminder #1
You have to make time to take care of yourself. Teachers are especially vulnerable to burnout, and it’s easy as a first year teacher to let your job consume your life. But if you’re going to be in it for the long haul, you have to take care of yourself from day one.
Reminder #2
You’re going to make mistakes. You will mess up a lesson. You will say something you wish you could take back. You will have a frustrating conversation with an administrator. You’re human, and it happens. Don’t beat yourself up. Apologize, learn what you can, and do better next time.
Reminder #3
Don’t grade everything. Your teacher credential program likely taught you not to assign work that you don’t intend to provide feedback on. Good advice for student learning, but utterly impractical in reality. Let some assignments be credit-no credit, for participation points, or for ungraded practice. Save your time for the assignments that matter most while still finding ways to hold your students accountable for learning (if everything is credit-no credit, students will learn quickly that they don’t have to try).
This was a lot of advice: once we started, it was hard to stop thinking of all the things we wanted to tell you. But we’re so glad you’re here. We need you. Your students need you. And you’re going to be okay. It’s scary to be new at anything, much less new to teaching, but you’ll figure it out and one day have advice for a new generation of teachers.
We’re here to help you! Not only do we post regular blogs about teaching and design high-quality instructional materials you can trust, but we love to do everything we can to support teachers like you. Sign up for our Free Resource Library (includes an MLA common mistakes guide, an analytic rubric, ideas for teaching theme, a model for writing letters of recommendation, a teacher planner, four parent email templates, and more), and in addition to those resources, you’ll be added to our email list. We send out weekly encouragement to make you feel a little less alone in this challenging profession.