No matter what you do, you won’t be ready for your first day as a teacher. Every teacher I’ve worked with or spoken to agrees on this. It didn’t matter if we were fresh out of college or moving into teaching after working in another field, none of us had good memories about that first day at work, and the first five minutes of it have become a recurrent nightmare for more than one of the teachers I know.

You get advice, of course. Even people who’ve never taught a day in their lives will tell the freshly hired teacher that the secret is simple: prepare. But here’s the thing: all the teachers I’ve spoken to did prepare. And they all say it didn’t help them much.

Another thing is common in all the conversations I’ve had with my colleagues and friends during any conversation about that first day: “If only I knew then what I know now.” But obviously experience would help have helped us. The paradox is that we have to start without experience in order to start gaining it.

We all agree that we could have used some decent advice on how to deal with that first day. Most of us feel that we wouldn’t have known the right questions to ask, but if we could have just been pointed in the right direction, that first day wouldn’t have started so badly, and ended in such complete chaos. Simple things, like what to prepare, how to prepare it, and how to use it in class.

So with that in mind, I’ve decided to give out a few tips on how to get past day one, and on to day two and beyond. Much of what I’m sharing here I’ve learned through making the very mistakes I will describe – and through the years seeing how things have gone wrong in my class. None of us are perfect, and we will always make mistakes, so get used to the idea, and remember that the person who may well learn the most from that first day at school could be the teacher.

The Basic Advice

So right away I’m just going to give out the basic advice on what experience has slowly bashed into my head. I’ll go into detail about these further on.

1. The first day, the first morning, and the first five minutes. Those are key times, and they are listed in ascending order. You own those times, and you’ll have a good year.
2. Be very clear about your classroom routines before the first day dawns. Even quite mature learners don’t respond well to too many changes in routine, and young learners are pretty much allergic to them, so you need routines that are good enough that they will cover many situations and that won’t need to be changed too much through the year. Prep here will save you tons of headaches through the year.

Then, be clear that you’ll need these things in bucketloads on that first day:

• Humility- to know that you’re not going to get everything right.
• Patience- to realize that your learners aren’t going to get it right, either.
• Flexibility- to see how your class is responding, and to work with their response.
• A good sense of humor- to deal with the entire process.

Two simple things

Now, on to the details. First up, you already know that there are really only two things that will help you through that first day of teaching – and they will remain true until your last day, so it’s a good idea to get used to them early on in your career. They are:

1. Prepare
2. Be realistic about expectations. This is true for you and for your class: expect that you will make mistakes, and expect that your learners will, too. Then, be happy when you all get things right.

That’s it. There’s the advice that you could get from anyone, teacher or lay person. What you don’t often get, though, is advice on how to prepare, and on what a realistic expectation of a lesson will be. So we’re going to have a look at these two ideas in a bit of depth, and I’m going to share my personal knowledge and experience, and the knowledge I’ve gained from conversations with colleagues.

What to expect

This may be the first time someone has given you advice to lower your expectations, so I need to explain what I mean here.

Both you and your learners will be unsettled that first day, and you will not be able to get a great sense of their response to your classroom techniques yet. So you need to be realistic about what you as a teacher can expect to achieve on the first day: while you’ll work miracles in class, it won’t happen immediately. Get your groundwork done on the first day, and then build on it over the course of the year.

You will have times on that first day when things don’t go as smoothly as you planned, and you will have times when something you haven’t planned for happens. You’ll need to be flexible, and to have many different activities planned for your day, so you can select the most appropriate way of dealing with events as they unfold.

So how do you prepare for the unexpected? You start with working out a reasonable expectation of your goals for the day, and then work out your plans from there.

Forget learning; focus on doing

The truth is you can’t actually teach much on that first day, and the things that you should be teaching have nothing to do with your teaching subject. Forget Math or English or any of the other subject areas. You can probably forget them for the first week – especially if you teach the lower elementary grades and kindergarten. That first day, and the first few weeks, will be a very unsettled time for your students; no matter what age they are (some teachers argue that this may be more true for adult learners, who have been out of the school system for a while). Given the unsettled state of your learners, you can’t expect them to be able to concentrate fully and absorb much abstract knowledge straight away- after all, you’re a stranger to them, and they’re strangers to you, too.

Rather focus on what matters: getting your learners to feel comfortable in your class, and to get to know each other and you. The way to do this is to give your learners a very sound idea of the procedures and the boundaries in your classroom – it sounds grim, but you can be creative about this, and I’ve noticed that learners who know the rules are generally happier and more productive in class, because they feel more secure.

This means you need to lay out your rules, and show your learners how you want your class to behave. So these are the first things you need to prepare before you get into class on day one.

Rules are made to be broken

Unfortunately, very often rules are made to be broken. Failing to think about rules in the right way, and failing to explain them in the right way, will lead to a situation where your learners will ignore them. So your job is to set the rules in a way that they aren’t made to be broken. Unfortunately, setting rules can be quite difficult for a novice teacher – and even experienced teachers can have trouble with them. Luckily, there are some surprisingly simple rules about setting simple rules, which I’ve learned after some pretty rough experience:

• Rule lists are often way too long: lists of 15 or 20 rules are self- defeating. Your students will switch off during the explanation, or even at the mere sight of the list, and if they won’t listen to the rules they definitely won’t follow them.
• Rule lists are usually way too negative: Don’t, Don’t, No. Maybe these are good words to use when you’re trying to make someone do something, but they’re not very good ways to get someone to do something of their own free will. And that’s ultimately what class rules should be aiming for: your learners want to behave in the manner set out, because they get praised and rewarded for doing that. Even calling your list of rules “The list of rules” may be self-defeating. Using a word like “guide” or “goals” may be better.
• Rules are usually accompanied by sanctions, rather than rewards: Remember Aesop’s fable about the North Wind and the Sun? People are stubborn, whether they’re young or old, and it’s both easier and much more constructive for someone to work for praise and rewards than it is to work out of fear of punishment. This is such a simple concept it’s incredible how this gets forgotten in the classroom, but forgotten it is. And often, too: I’m sure we can all think of a teacher who we hated because of this, and no-one wants to remembered as that kind of teacher.
• Rules are either too specific or too broad to be followed correctly: I’ve seen (and made) rules like these:

1. “NO laughing”
   1. “NO talking“
   2. ”Don’t be negative”
   3. “Smile“

Think hard about the rules that you set in class. What do you want the rule to achieve? Is it possible to follow the rule every minute of every day? If you’d like to encourage sharing, then your rule should encourage all sharing, of everything, all the time. As a side note, no-one can be positive and smiling all the time, and as a teacher you should be encouraging these through your approach to your work, not through a rule.

My current list of rules (we call them goals) for my classes of first- and second-grade ESL kids is:

• Speak English
• Follow instructions
• Share and help

And I’ve found that it does a pretty good job of guiding behavior. It’s short enough for my young learners to grasp on day one, it remains valid until the end of their school life at my school, and it’s couched in positive language. Just to explain about the first rule before I get any flak for being a linguistic imperialist: there are no sanctions placed on students who don’t follow the rule, but it’s up there to show that ideally students should try to speak in English the whole time they’re in class. It’s also there to allow me to give out plenty of stars, stamps and stickers to my class for even trying to speak English in my class- and it’s especially helpful on the days when no-one is obeying rules 2 and 3, because I can still reward students for something on those days.

Once you get your rules together, you need to think of how you’re going to explain them. Try to use one example for each rule at least (where possible) and introduce the rules somewhere during the first morning of your first day, preferably as soon as possible. Role-play the behaviors, both good and bad, and elicit possible rewards and sanctions from your learners.

Through experience, I’ve noticed learners will usually latch onto the bad behavior and create a punishment for it, which I think says quite a lot about how kids are usually treated. I’ve already told you about how I feel about classroom punishment (and I’m going to bang on about it again in the section below), but I have found that it’s good to run with the punishment theme for a bit at this stage of the rule-explanation process. In fact, it’s often quite a fun thing for them to do, and it gives the teacher a remarkable set of advantages in a classroom.

First off, it will allow you to see whether they get the rule at all. Often, I hear some of my students saying that the positive behavior should get the punishment. Then I go back and try to explain the rule again. Added to this, I’ve found that allowing the students to set the sanction democratizes the class, and lets the learners feel they have a larger stake in the classroom process, which usually starts the whole behavior issue off on the right foot. And you get a chance to hear (and say) some pretty crazy things about the punishments that you elicit – like kids who talk out of turn get put into the trash can- which usually get good laughs from your class. As a final advantage, you get to know your learners better, and I’ve even been able to pick up early warnings on who will be a classroom problem, or who has problems at home through this process.

Whatever you’ve talked about in your punishment section, you can choose whether to use in class or not (it’s really less important than the rewards). But once your learners have a good idea of the bad behavior, and they’ve talked about punishments just long enough to make them apprehensive about the year ahead, it’s time to switch things around. Go positive, and start working out the rewards for good behavior. This is the important part, and you should do your homework before the class starts in order to lead the discussion into the way you’d like things to run in your class.

Carrots and sticks: the reward and sanction system

To do this you’ll have to have a clear picture of how your class will be managed: How will you choose the class leader, and how long will they have this role? How will you group your students and how will you give out rewards – to individuals or to the group? How will you choose group leaders, who will hand out the books, the pencils etc. Experience has shown me that all of the classroom management and administration systems can become powerful rewards, so think about them in advance and work out how to assign students to those postions.

It’s probably a good idea to ask some of your more seasoned colleagues about how your new school runs things, and what they do in their own classes before you made any decisions here. This is especially true if you’re getting a second grade or higher class: go and talk to the home room teacher from the year before, and see if you like their classroom management. If you import good practices from the year before that your students are already familiar with, they will be able to settle and get into your classroom style that much easier.

When you have this sorted out in your head, you’ll be able to plan how you’re going to reward your students for being good, and think of what to do when they’re bad. I hesitate to say punish them, and I think for good reason:

My idea of classroom behavior is that there is target behavior (or good behavior) that I’m trying to encourage in my students, and there is non- target behavior that I’m trying to discourage. So if someone does something well, they should get a very obvious and noticeable reward, but if someone is doing something that isn’t encouraged they shouldn’t be “punished” in a way that will lead them to feel victimized and resentful. As the positive behavior is encouraged, the negative should be discouraged. As effectively and effortlessly as possible, while still being proportional to the action and allowing the student to take responsibility for their action and see the consequences of it.

Often this means a simple talking to, outlining why the action wasn’t a very good one, but there should be a hierarchy of actions that you can take, and you should be clear on what they are and how they would escalate. You should then be able to explain this hierarchy to your class while you explain the guidelines.

Be clear, though, that you should encourage and praise a lot more than you should discourage. Often, the easiest way for me to change a negative action is not even to talk to the student committing the offence, but to find someone who is doing a similar action in a positive way and using them as an example, with lots of praise and attention. Just think about whether you (as an adult with greater cognitive and psychological resources, and a more resilient ego) would like someone to single you out as a bad example. If the answer is no, then think very carefully before you do it to a child.

But obviously, you wouldn’t go into the details of every action that will happen in class on that first day, and you should be prepared to go through your examples and rules at least once a day, expanding and revising them as necessary until your class has a very good grasp on target behavior and the reward system.

Rules explained? Check. Now what?

Sticking to the explanation of the rules for the whole of that first day is obviously a bad idea, but what more can we do? The learners are unsettled, and concentration is going to be all over the place, so expecting too much is out. Now what?

The wonderful people at I Love That Teaching Idea! put the words to how I feel about this: Follow your class routine, and where appropriate, jump right into your syllabus:

But wait a minute (I hear you say): the kids will be unsettled, and concentration will be low. A section above this said Forget Learning, and now you’re telling us to jump into the syllabus? How does that work?

Well, you’ve got to give them something to do. You should give them something interesting and challenging, so that they will enjoy it and be able to tell their parents about it when they go home. You also want to set the tone for your class for the rest of the year: in this classroom, we’ll work, and we’ll have fun. Just be prepared to go over the subject matter again soon, as you can’t guarantee results on day one.

Let’s have a more detailed look at what this means:

You’ll start your day with a warm-up activity, like a song, the date and day, weather chart etc. Then you’ll introduce yourself, trying to keep it light and focusing on what will get reactions from your class. Letting them guess your age can be a great (if completely humbling) activity, and telling them your interests can also be good, if you can link your interests with theirs. This can get you closer to your group, but especially with teenagers this can make you look like a complete fool, too, so if you teach sensitive age groups, try to find out from other teachers or kids in the school what they like doing at that age.

After this, you can let your students introduce themselves – to the whole class or in smaller groups, and there a million different ways to do this. Exactly how you do this will differ depending on a lot of factors such as class size and age, so have a look around the internet and find some creative ways of getting this done that aren’t too complicated for you to do on that first day. Then you can get into your explanation of class rules and routines, and then move into your subject area.

For your subject area lesson, you really should over-prepare. First, choose your core content and activity, and then develop a lot of smaller activities, games and songs that you can use around this content. You don’t know your class, and if they eat your lesson in five minutes, and then start looking around for something to do, it’s nice not to have to think of activities on the fly. Conversely, if you give them a five-minute time filler and then find that they need to take the whole morning to do it, it’s good to know whether you can let the class run with it.

Here’s a list of websites that will give you some great tips and ideas for activities. Many have downloadable worksheets and bulletin board templates, and you’ll probably find them so good you’ll use them well after your first day!

Dltk-Dids: this site has awesome downloadable content! Printables range from letters and numbers to greeting cards, so you’re sure to find what you need.

Enchanted Learning: Another killer site for printables, with lots of activites on a wide range of subjects. They even have Spanish language activities. There is a membership option, with banner-free pages and easily printable downloads, but you can still get a lot of materials without joining.

Youtube: this can be a great way to get and store visual clips for your classes. Just check your school policy on using this site, and know the exact page you’d like to use rather than searching in class, as some content from here is not appropriate for class and you can have copyright issues. Unfortunately, your IT administrator may have locked your school network out of this site, as well.

Teach-Nology: Literally thousands of printables, worksheets, rubrics and rubric generators, and all for free. Added to that tips and themes, and you’ve got a lot of help on this page.

I Love That Teaching Idea: A great site for tips for teachers and substitutes, with ideas ranging from art to writing, math to health and holidays, this is a good site to go to for help and a fresh approach to a subject.

Just a quick disclaimer: it’s your responsibility to find out your school’s attitude to anything you get from these websites, and to take into account any copyright laws that may apply. I’m not responsible for this.