Why Most New Teacher Advice is Senseless.
I did it too!
My blog features some posts offering tips to new teachers. Ironically, during my third year of teaching, I felt I mastered the basics: discipline, WIDA standards, building relationships, confidence during observations, routines, and procedures for smooth class functioning.
Thus, having survived the first year of sink-or-swim teaching experience, I figured I could spare some advice to a new teacher.
Like many, my posts called for not giving up, taking it easy, and opening oneself to learning. For some odd reason, these teachings now sound as senseless as saying a brief “just take it easy” to a woman giving birth without an epidural.
How could I be so self-absorbed assuming I can help a new teacher through a rough patch of the career?
What made me reevaluate my advice is that as a teacher striving for efficiency, I despise general advice and on-stage slogans about giving your heart and life to the kids. “Let’s teach for life, not for tests” is dead to me if it’s not followed by a concrete set of lesson plans and techniques I could use tomorrow in my classroom.
Although my intentions were good, I failed to provide an A-to-Z plan of action, and without a plan, everything is ironically pompous.
Well, to be entirely fair, all types of advice to new teachers could be valid and useful. Yes, “don’t give up” and “take it easy” are ridiculously generic and bewildering; however, this is, in fact, everything that could save your sanity the first year of teaching.
After that, the second year requires clear directions, “1-2-3-steps” type of explanation of literally everything. Without examples, any advice is just a tap on the shoulder of the drowning person. Don’t you agree?
My past as a new teacher is a sad spot in my memory. I remember some of my first interviews for a teaching position. The questions were too broad and theoretical, and my answers indeed were juts learned abstracts of textbook articles about what to say if… “How would you solve discipline problems? How would you motivate? Give an example of a lesson that would address this standard. What would the day look like in your classroom?” – these questions are fair to an experienced teacher, but to a new candidate, they are just an invitation to lie and cite what is expected from them to get the job.
This year I’m exploring a new position of a second-grade teacher. Transferring from ESL high school and middle school environment, the elementary level seems like a new planet.
I honestly tried to google the essentials of the elementary classroom and the basics I need to have. Painfully for me, this time, I also felt like a new teacher, just like four years ago during my first unsuccessful interview. “Stations, reading levels, writer’s workshops, reader’s workshops, hallway behavior rules” – this sounds Greek to me.
I sat down, compiled a list that seemed to contain the essentials I need to start my first year as a second-grade teacher. The list turned lengthy and overwhelming.
To get some ideas, I turned to TpT. With high ratings and tons of downloads by fellow teachers, the resources look promising although the problem of a new teacher is not in finding the resources but in FIGURING OUT HOW and WHY one needs to use it. What’s the benefit of one resource over the other?
There is no shortage of information anymore. Through the membership of 40-hour workweek club by Angela Watson, I have access to tons of terrific looking resources. The problem, however, is I don’t know why I need to use a particular resource, and using all of the available ones would probably be too overwhelming. But how can I tell?
An abundance of resources on online platforms dramatically differs from the scarcity of applicable knowledge given in graduate classes. College doesn’t really have a class about Domain 4, it doesn’t explain the Danielson rubric of teacher’s professional evaluation (in NJ), it doesn’t have a class on the set up of the elementary teacher space, and it is definitely missing significant pointers on classroom management.
Meanwhile, these things are more important than a new graduate’s ability to write a lesson plan. I wish new teacher resources or new teacher advice held a really detailed instruction similar to “turn right, move five steps forward, turn the switch on.”
Writer’s workshop bundle? Why do I need it, and what’s the logistics of using it in a classroom? Tracking the progress of a reading level? Then – how many reading levels are there? Why do I need to track them? Decode the abbreviations and explain the terms.
What I found most confusing and frustrating in new teacher resources and advice is the assumption that new teachers know all the basics and manipulate the concepts easily: RTI, ID intervention, sight words, literacy centers, reading response journals, CVC words and many more.
Apart from being smacked in the face by those concepts that I never came across as a high school and middle school teacher, I find no real description of why I would need a particular resource in my 2-grade classroom. Do I need it? Or is it an addition?
All in all, there is a plethora of amazing resources, but there are little new teacher-friendly materials to explain the sophisticated workings of a real-life classroom.
Once again, new beginnings will require a trial-and-error method. It will take time to adjust and separate crops from the weeds.
Meanwhile, I tell myself once again: take it easy; it should not be rocket science!
Don’t forget to take care of yourself!
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