I have been asked " What do I teach? " this question seven times in the past 6 months. I thought I will write a guide to help out some of our brand new teachers out there and some of our veteran teachers who get burn out, (this is why we have vacations in the teaching profession).
Welcome to teaching! Welcome back to Teaching!
I'm excited to see new faces. New teachers are full of ideas, enthusiasm, and energy! These are great characteristics to have when you starting in teaching. Also, I see my colleagues in the Fall, they are all re-energized from vacations, and they can not wait to get their classroom set up!
Where do you start? Start wherever speaks to you. There is no order at all, ---I just lied---Classroom Management before all. Set your routines, schedules, and traditions for the year before anything else. Then pick a number and reflect below and start with any of them. I use numbers so it helps to know all the possible methods that may help you.
What is Classroom Management?
Classroom management is what the
students have to do to be in your classroom. It is also your ability to talk to the students in order to set an order for you to be heard and understood anywhere you are with your group of students---anywhere in the school---in a field trip---anywhere! It is respect. It is an schedule. It is an understanding of what the day will be like in your classroom. Boring? Fun? Scary? Exciting? Puzzling?
If you do not get excited about passing on your wisdom, sharing what you have learned with patience, and your shortcuts of how to learn, or do a project, I will respectfully ask you to leave this profession. It is not for you. I have seen colleagues who yelled every day in their classroom----hint---if you are yelling---you do not have classroom management under control. It is sad! I feel sorry for those students! Can you imagine if your own kids were sitting in a classroom with a teacher like that? I do try to guide my adult colleagues to go find what their passion is, because it is not for teaching! Well, there are all kinds of students in the world, some fast, some very very slow to get it, and everyone else somewhere in between.
Do you remember your favorite teacher? Why did you like/unlike her class? What did she/he make you do every day? Did you like it? or hate it? Please do not set a classroom to take revenge on all those bad teachers you had at school. What do you want your students to remember you by? What would be your contribution to their education? Be positive, enthusiastic, and creative!
Classroom management are set routines you
do everyday to maintain an order so you can deliver your lessons. No
order, no lessons! For example: Every morning by the first bell, my
students know that they have to line up with their backpacks,
before they come in we shake hands and they have to reply to me whatever
welcome I give them. Usually it is "Good Morning". Any substitute
teacher that I have, knows to shake and salute before the kids come in.
This is a set routine to enter the classroom.
Then, my students
walk over, hang their backpack, hang their coats or sweaters in a
hanger, and come to sit down for me to speak about today---while we are
waiting, kids have the freedom to talk to each other about whatever, the
rain, their troubles, their siblings, etc. I get my laptop going, drink some tea!
I have a teaching wall. I have the most important activities that they have to know in front of them. It is made out of five pocket charts of different sizes. I am a Bilingual Spanish Kindergarten. So I adjust what I have in this wall. First things first. I set up who is going to be the Teacher of the Day. So every student takes a turn to be the teacher for a day. When is their turn--they (copy me), and delivers the Teaching Wall to the classmates with songs, chants, readings, counting, every day. Every day.
I teach 180 days in a school year. Look at your contract and find out how many days you teach.
0. Before you can think about what to teach, you must have Classroom
Management. If you can not control the students at any given point during the day (inside, outside, in the cafeteria, in recess, in an assembly, in a field trip), you
will never be able to deliver all those clever, beautiful, funny,
lessons you spent so much time putting together. No student, nor parent is going to appreciate any of your efforts at all! Trust me!
1. Look at the standards for your grade (whether you are using the State Standards or now the new Common Core Standards), which it would give you an idea of the skills the students need to have by the end of the school year. You are responsible for teaching those skills and writing in the report card whether the kids are learning them or not. The magic starts when you figured out how are you going to deliver those lessons for the students to learn.
2. Look at the report card for your grade. If the standards are not a high priority in your School District, then look at the report card (usually, they are aligned to your standards--usually!). Report cards usually have all the skills in all the subjects that students must learn, and it is a legal document for students getting services if they have any learning challenges during the school year. Some district have very strict policies about retention---others leave it to the teacher to decide if it would benefit the student at all. Please remember that just because a student does not speak English-----it does not mean----he does not understand you. Do not retained a student just because he has broken English. Does he understand the concepts? the big ideas? the process to do it? Does he have sense when he writes it?
3. Afterwards, you were most likely given some type of curriculum for Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, English as a Second Language, and Social Studies. If there is no curriculum that the District has adopted for any given subject--Do not panic! You can use the standards or report card as a guide. For example, I know that in Social studies and Science they give you an overall theme for your grade. Like American government which is 5th grade, the Roman Empire is for Sixth grade, Animals starts in second grade,Addition and subtraction starts in kindergarten, etc.
4. How are you going to put it all together? Well, this start with you. You need to look at what make you arrive to teaching? Why do you want it to be a teacher? Was is something you always want it to do? Were you told by friends and family of how good of a communicator you are? Take a look at yourself and answer the following questions to get you going: Are you a talker? Are you a visual person? How do you learn a new skill? Do you like to play games? Do you use memorization skills like flash cards? Teaching is a reflection of how good of a student you are. So in other words, you will be mirroring your own study skills.
Yes, you will have to break it down, make it fun and interesting, a lot of scaffolding, and tons of vocabulary with definitions. Vocabulary to teach ANY subject is KEY! (This is all about how creative you can get, what kind of materials you have develop? Have you heard of Teachers pay teachers? or Teachers Notebook? These are websites of teachers who have written their own curriculum and their own activities because the Published given Curriculum lacks so much. I write my own. I want to control how to deliver the lesson so that the students get it from the start based on what they have to know for their grade.
5. Another tip for you is to see the big picture. In the adopted curriculum suggest you how to deliver those lessons, whole group? small groups? Hands-on projects? worksheets? books to make?
This is where two bigger skills that you must have come into play: Classroom Management, and Organization. Yes! It is a cycle----a cycle of inquiry. It starts all over again!
Does this make sense to you? I hope this helps you. This is a guide---just a guide---there are many other thousand ways to go about organizing, gathering, and more importantly Reflecting what kind of teacher you want to grow up to be.
Teaching is a combination of common sense, reflection, pondering, observations, and performance. Some call it an Art, others called a Science. I just simply call it "Teaching".
Share your experience and your own tips, what do you teach? where do you start? I will love to hear your experience. Leave me a comment!
