Top Tips for New Teachers from our Facebook Fans!

I often have emails and messages from teachers who are turning down a new road into ‘real teacher’ street. I often get asked about what resources they would recommend ….. Where do I start with that question? I also get asked a lot about managing the classroom, paper work and where to start. 

I know that teachers themselves are the best resources to help new teachers. Along with being thrown into a classroom of insatiable, energetic, vibrant and well let’s admit it, challenging dispositions! 

Teachers by nature are a helpful bunch, always willing to offer up ideas, advice, experience, wisdom and tips. I wanted to highlight tips and perspectives from experienced teachers and thought this might be a microcosm of the bigger world. I know that my Facebook fans are always so helpful so the meeting of these ideas birthed a collection of helpful tips for new teachers. 

I have collated the tips as a free file for you. They are helpful and some are a bit funny too!

Here are some of the comments to the question posed on out Facebook page: 
What are your one or two top tips for new teachers?

~ Be happy in your job, whether its day care, teaching, home school, vacation care- whatever. Love what you do and your practice will reflect you.
~ Have FUN with your students! Show them learning is fun & a life- long journey. They’ll remember you & appreciate this life skill you have taught them.
~ Every day is a new day. Learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, but be present in today. Pay attention to the non-verbal aspects of your students as much as to what they say.
~ At the first of the year-get it clear in your mind what you want the children to do when they follow your instructions (what does it look like to line up, put away backpacks or sit at the table?) Do you need to rearrange the room to accommodate what you have in mind?
* Read further to find out how you can access all 34 of the tips our fans left. 

I then took all of the responses and summarized them to form 17 top tips. As I read and collated the tips, I noticed several common themes and decided to write them down as I read each response. I thought that organizing them into a poster could come in handy and it is also an easy way to grab the tips at a glance. This poster could be used to discuss alongside professional goal development for the new kids on the block.

You could use the one page poster as a handout with any new teacher orientation programs that you have running at your school. It could also be a poster display in your staff area. In any case, I just hope that it helps. 

~ Oh, and I didn’t include my tips which would be:

1. Develop systems that work for you around expectations, routines, lesson implementation, organizing your ‘stuff’, how you plan… the list goes on.

Develop social skills including expectations from the beginning and be consistent with them and share your reasoning for your approaches with your students.

By clicking on the image above, you can download the file via Google Docs.

You might also like to follow this fantastic Pinterest board that Erin Wing runs called ‘New Teachers‘. The board has over 585, 000 followers and 140 contributors with strong educational backgrounds.

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Thank you to Mel over at Graphics from the Pond for her wonderful stick kids clip art.