Survive Your First Day of Teaching
by This will help you plan and be successful on your first day in front of your new class.
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.
- 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.
- 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:
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Post CommentBafer
On April 13, 2008 at 8:12 pm
It’s a really useful one. Definitely help my first day teaching in Asia.
Bafer
On April 13, 2008 at 8:18 pm
It’s a really useful one. Definitely help my first day teaching in Asia.
Susie Meyer
On April 13, 2008 at 8:35 pm
I think this is among the most useful article for any first-time teachers- like myself. I have tried some of the discipline method from this article in my own ESL classroom in Korea on the first school day and it works like a charm. I’ve also prepared a rewarding-chart in my classroom to help with the discipline so the children can keep counting on their own scores and earn a big colorful sticker at the end of the day for those who have the highest scores.
taliesyn30
On April 15, 2008 at 2:54 am
A lovely article – daveb. Thank you for this! I hope this article gets lots of hits! I have 15 years of teaching experience and must say I get a lot of new teachers asking me for the magic formula – and of course one doesn’t exist per se. I would gladly refer a new teacher to these guidelines tho!
I particularly agree with the “forget about learning” part, but would have put it slightly differently! Yes, emphasise the doing part of things but keep it focused – try and make it active learning, so that the kids are having so much fun doing stuff that they do not realise that they are learning things! The new teacher really gets an opportunity to discover the different characters in their class in this way!
Also, when I start a new tutor group, like everyone else I am duty bound to go over the rules and regulations. So this is what I do – I ask the students themselves to create the list of rules, with the proviso that this is what they must stick to throughout the year. Put them in small groups and ask them to come up with a few rules for each group that they then report back to the class. They then get to discuss the pros and cons of each rule and decide which to keep and which to discard. With some clever footwork you can cover all of the institution’s rules but the kids think that they are making them up. I’m not sure whether you would call it democracy in action or benign dictatorship! Strangely, the kids often create a set of rules which is in many ways more punitive than the institution;s own. I then ask one of the kids to word process the set of rules and have it laminated – then it gets pinned up on a wall. That way they are constantly reminded of the rules that they themselves have put in place – and can be reminded of this when they err from the path of good behavior!
Anyway, enough of me going on. Thanks again for a well thought out and helpful article!
daveb_za
On April 15, 2008 at 8:05 am
Hey, no worries taliesyn30! Glad you liked it, and thought it was useful.
I agree with you about the “Forget about learning” thing, but I thought since it was such a long article I needed to keep the headings kind of shocking, to keep the readers going.
daveb_za
On April 15, 2008 at 8:06 am
Hey, no worries taliesyn30! Glad you liked it, and thought it was useful.
I agree with you about the “Forget about learning” thing, but I thought since it was such a long article I needed to keep the headings kind of shocking, to keep the readers going.