8 Things To Focus On For A New ESL Teacher.
Starting a teaching career is quite a launch in terms of its effects on your life and the people around you. Starting as a new ESL teacher can either turn you off or give you the environment to propel your career. Let’s talk about eight things a new ESL teacher should keep in mind.
1. Teach concepts and skills.
It is quite apparent, isn’t it? Wrong. Well, at least for me it was not something I knew when I started teaching. At the very beginning, I was destructed and overwhelmed by the number of things I felt I had to “fix.“ How can you teach “Students will be able to cite textual evidence to support their ideas” to students who struggle with saying their name or performing basic tasks in the English language. Wrong verb usage, missing punctuation, misspelling would work for me as a red cloth for a bull. I would waste time and energy trying to fix what seemed to be a disaster and miss teaching what my students were supposed to learn.
And then the a-ha moment happened.
After my first and my second year of teaching, I caught myself getting rid of tons of materials because I felt I didn’t want to teach this anymore. I felt those materials (that actually took an enormous amount of time to develop) miss the point with my students and are a too painful piece of memory to use them again. I hated them, and I would make a vow to myself to never use them again. Back then, throwing literally bags and bags of papers that I hated, I pondered a question: how can I come to a more sustainable method of creating materials that I wouldn’t have to throw away? Can I avoid throwing hours and hours of work into the garbage can?
And then it hit me: I need to focus on teaching something that I can reuse over and over again and something that would be of higher value to my students. The answer was – teaching concepts. What does it mean? All students need to be able to master the concept of the main idea and supporting details. All students need to be able to learn the skill of revising their own work and self-correcting. Even in teaching ESL, this principle stands firm. Bingo! This was a fundamental understanding that shifted my attention toward creating reusable materials that focus on concepts and skills, and that can be of much higher value to my students. Therefore, in your curriculum, identify concepts and skills you are to teach. Teach them through content. Sprinkle grammar if it helps students to master the critical concepts and skills. Develop materials that can be reused and disregard the rest.
2. Differentiate.
Differentiation has become a buzzword. Also, everyone has a different perspective on differentiation ranging from disbelief in the possibility of using it in a classroom (with limited resources and multiple proficiency and grade levels) to a blind dogmatism when differentiation is a must no matter how realistic it is for a teacher to do this. What I have learned in my teaching practices told me that differentiation is unavoidable. You cannot just target the average majority disregarding high and low performers. You need to minimize “collateral damage” when you have multiple proficiency and grade levels in a classroom.
What’s important is to find the way how differentiation can work best for your class while taking minimum time and energy. What I found works for me is differentiation at 2 levels: process and product. Differentiation at the level of process is related to the way students learn and how content is taught. In designing this step, I keep in mind the following principle: in presenting new content I strive for using sound, pictures, text, physical movement. Differentiating at the level of product, I invest in designing assessments that would adequately evaluate my average majority, high and low performers. Usually, this entails some tweaking of the assignment by providing simple, clear instructions with more scaffolding for low performers and raising the abstraction level for my high performers. And that’s about it. What I don’t do is creating multiple lesson plans for the same classroom.
3. Develop systems.
Developing well-performing systems is a must to save your time and energy. What are we talking about? Think about what you want to happen in your classroom every day automatically without your involvement. Also, think about how you want to fulfill your professional responsibilities most efficiently with the maximum return on energy and time investment.
For example, decide how your class starts every single day of the year and make it automatic. In my classroom, I use a 5-minute “Do Now” activity that students do as soon as they come, without my instructions, obligatory, every day. In giving mini-lessons on grammar, I use “rotation stations” which means every group of students receives a bin with a task they have to complete in 7-10 minutes until they get 2 minutes for checking answers and then move to the next task. This process happens without my involvement, it is timed, students check their answers and ask for my assistance only if they are confused about the answers.
In performing my responsibilities, I have systems I use to check students’ work and batch lesson planning. For example, I never check tests or projects until every single student submits work. I also use ready-to print rubrics and ready-to-print comments to simplify the assessment process. I never grade classroom work. I allot two-three hours every two weeks to batch unit planning when I formulate learning objectives, language objectives, and identify the standards I hit. The details don’t matter at this point.
I also limit my time looking for resources I plan to use. I have only three hours once in two weeks to look for resources I plan to use. I don’t allow myself to exceed this time limit. Therefore, three hours I spend on searching for resources is highly focused, and interruptions are minimized. These systems of how you start a class, how you teach mini-lessons, how you batch planning, how you assess, etc. should be timed, automated, highly focused, and yield maximum return with minimum effort. Having well-performing systems is essential for teacher’s well-being and sanity.
4. Keep quality materials only.
In teaching, don’t be distracted by shiny objects. TeachersPayTeachers, AllThingsGrammar, ESLLibrary, ISLCollective are full of great resources that are highly effective in the classroom. However, be selective. These platforms also have stuff which is just beautiful or doesn’t have much value in a real-life classroom. Don’t be afraid to experiment, but keep only resources that were 99 percent effective in teaching the target skills. Don’t pile up unnecessary stuff. Limit yourself to 5 great examples of materials to teach one concept and discard the rest. Believe me, you will never use the worksheet that was “kind of OK” next year. Your purpose is to provide high value with a minimum number of resources.
5. Network.
Networking means connecting to people whose advice you can seek. Very often teachers feel isolated in their distress caused by entering a new career or living through a difficult stage in your employment as a teacher. It’s a challenge sometimes to leave a classroom because there is always a shortage of time to do work. You squelch while moving through your day or your first year of teaching barely making it, trying to survive just because you think that reinventing the wheel is smart or you don’t want to bother others. This is a big mistake.
Networking with real people in your school or connecting with those who have already been there can save tons of time and can keep you from leaving your career. For example, networking helped me find Angela Watson’s tribe at 40-Hour-Work Week Club and The Cornerstone For Teachers, Jennifer Gonzales’ tribe at The Cult of Pedagogy, and John Lee Dumas’ tribe of intrapreneurs. These people and platforms have altered my perception of my profession and my life. Networking and meeting people at my school gave me access to valuable ideas, free resources, encouragement, inspiration, and much more.
Find your tribe! Connect with like-minded people. Don’t wait until your professional or personal life fixes itself.
6. Give yourself time.
Don’t expect to become a good teacher in your first year of teaching. Try to survive and learn the lessons that come your way. The first year of teaching is a huge learning curve. Focus on small but necessary changes. Start with creating boundaries between your home and your work. Master one skill at a time. Conquer the basics of lesson planning. Find a mentor. Accelerate in professional learning as needed. Continue with developing sustainable systems that work for you. Learn to tackle the overwhelm. Strive for the maximum return on the minimum investment of time and energy. Give it time.
7. Develop your own way of lesson planning.
No fancy lectures here. Pick one strategy that works for you and don’t overcomplicate things. How about a one-sentence lesson plan by Norman Eng? Short. Fast. Efficient. Read more about it here.
8. Make mistakes.
Until a certain point in my life, I was always tempted by the lure of perfection. I wanted to be as flawless as possible to avoid a heart-break or self-criticism. Not anymore. I don’t want to skirt past difficulties and mistakes. I strain myself to face the challenges and get the most out of the learning situation. As they say, mastery and success come from failing only. There is no way around. Mistakes made at the beginning of your career or other endeavors will dole out rewards later throughout your life. Learn. Never settle for the familiar, ordinary and banal. Mistakes will follow. Embrace them.
Good luck!
Related articles:
Handling The Overwhelm In First Years of Teaching.
33 Ways To Save Time And Money As A Teacher.
10 Lessons I Have Learned In My 2 Years Of Teaching.
Why I Stopped My Contributions to 403b for Teachers.
