You’re a New Teacher. It Can Be Messy But Also Thrilling

You’re a New Teacher. It Can Be Messy But Also Thrilling

I should have trusted my students more and given them ownership of their learning (more student-centeredness). Instead, I found choice boards to be fun; the students could develop creative tools to show their understanding of the topic (at least with 2nd grade and up).

2. Be nice to yourself and to others: Not every lesson will be perfect, but that is an opportunity for you as a teacher to reflect upon what works and what needs a revamp. Avoid negative people at all costs. I have shared this article titled “Find Your Marigold” by Jennifer Gonzalez with my beginning teachers. I find it concise and inspirational—a must-read for all beginning teachers.

3. Learn everything you can from a mentor teacher: I had a great English partner when I was in the dual-immersion program. I shadowed her all I could and I learned many great strategies from her. I wish I had done that when I first started teaching. Remember that you are not alone in the profession, as there are many teachers that you can learn from.

Kayla Towner is a technology trainer/instructor for Utah Education Network (UEN) and a Utah Hope Street Fellow in Salt Lake City. Follow her on Twitter @mrstowner9 or email her at [email protected]:

As I look back on my first years of teaching, I have many such thoughts as “Why didn’t I think of doing it like this,” “I should have done that,” or “I wish someone told me this!” However, there is so much going on in your first year it can be overwhelming. Based on my organized and planned-out personality, it would have been helpful to hear these three pieces of advice: Organize your content as you teach, know your technology, and have clear communication with families.

Starting out as a first-year teacher can be stressful and daunting. There are countless teachers giving you materials to teach with, and you can easily forget what you used and how you used it. I wish someone had told me to keep a running record (physical or online) for all of my content. Once I finished a unit, I could have posted the materials in the binder and kept notes. This would have helped me tweak the unit for the next time I taught it.

For example, I taught a unit on the Civil War, and one year later, when I got to this section in my binder, it said, “Change up this unit, it needs to be more interactive.” I altered this lesson into a DeckToy (game-based learning website) and made it an interactive, game-based lesson that excited the students to learn about the Civil War. In addition, it’s a great time saver for the next year, because I already have something lined up in my lesson plans.

Something that I did not think was a high priority as a teacher was technology. I came in as a 2nd grade teacher thinking that these students do not need technology. I realized how much technology could become a bridge between learners. It pushed high-level learners, accommodated low-level learners, and motivated everyone in their learning. Later, I moved into a 5th grade position and was awed by how much leverage technology gave my students.

My students were collaborating in Microsoft Class Notebooks and taking digital notes. I had other students create 3-D houses in Minecraft using a volume algorithm. By utilizing technology in the classroom, it allowed me to personalize learning. It gave my students autonomy in their learning and motivated them to want to come to school and learn.

The last bit of advice I would have told myself was the importance of clear communication with families. It can be so confusing when you first start. What is the best way to communicate with families? Do you send emails, newsletters, digital newsletters, Class Dojo messages, phone calls, etc? I would make it clear about the tools you are going to use throughout the year to communicate with families. However, it is important to be flexible with your platform(s).

I received the most support from families when I did weekly digital newsletters via Microsoft Sway or Class Dojo homepage. Families were able to quickly see weekly updates on content and student work, and there was no confusing log-in. Also, Class Dojo had a messaging feature where families could quickly send me a “text,” but we did not have to share personal numbers. This allowed for easy, no pressure communication. Overall, it was important to establish a few key places where I communicated with families, so everyone was involved.

The first year of teaching can be a bit messy and overwhelming, but it is such a thrilling rush. You learn a lot about yourself and what you can do to support your students. For all the first-year teachers out there, I hope these tips support and guide you through your beautiful, bustling year.

PJ Caposey is an award-winning educator, keynote speaker, consultant, and author of eight books (https://amzn.to/2MArWY5) who currently serves as the superintendent of schools for the nationally recognized Meridian CUSD 223 school district in northwest Illinois. You can find PJ on most social media platforms as MCUSDSupe:

I was never a great teacher. It pains me to say that to this day, but it is the truth. I left the classroom to move over to the dark side of administration too early in my career to ever become the teacher I believe that my kids deserved.

That said, I have had the privilege of being in thousands of classrooms and learning from some of the very best teachers (some newand noteworthy and others just absolutely doing great work in their corner of the universe) in the world. Knowing everything I know now, I would walk back into my first-year teacher classroom, now with a gray beard, and bestow the following three pieces of advice.

Early in my career, a neighboring teacher told me that the kids I was teaching could not do the work I was trying to have them complete. I listened. I lowered my standard. Some kids still did not pass my course. Others did.

The next year, I raised my standards. I upped my game. I tried new strategies. Fewer kids failed. The grade distribution improved. The expectations were higher.

The following year, I taught the material and held the standards I initially intended to. The kids struggled. I struggled. We both found our way forward. Still, fewer kids failed. Still, the grade distribution improved. The expectations were markedly higher.

Kids cannot rise to expectations you do not have of them, and I believe that one of the core responsibilities of a new teacher (any teacher, really) is to see kids for greater than they currently are or currently see themselves.

Critical thinking to me is best categorized via Bloom’s Taxonomy. I believe that all students, regardless of age, deserve to analyze, evaluate, or synthesize material every hour of every day. Our failure to allow kids to frequently practice thinking critically often leads to our frustration when we occasionally demand the same behavior.

If I had a nickel for every time a teacher assigned problems out of a book or off a worksheet and told the kids not to worry about the questions that are actually higher order in nature, I would be rich. This is the perfect coupling to piece of advice number one. If we do not expect kids to be able to create their own thoughts, exercise their own brilliance, and find new solutions to existing problems, then we are simply asking them to understand and apply knowledge already constructed.

This is not only boring and serves to diminish student enjoyment of school but does our society no favors as our students become our future.

One of the key reasons my failure rate dropped as I continued teaching is because . . . I continued teaching. When I first began, I had a traditional approach. I taught it. They demonstrated whether they learned the material or not. We moved forward. Simple approach. Mediocre results.

Then, a colleague asked me if what I was teaching was important. I was teaching sociology to a group of students that desperately needed to understand how societal roles, norms, and more were impacting them as traditionally underserved and marginalized students. I strongly and immediately asserted – YES!!

The calm retort to that answer was to ask me why I would move on when (insert random number) students did not show that they had learned this important material. At that point, my approach forever changed. Prior to that conversation, the timing of the assessment of learning was fixed, and learning MAY happen. After that conversation, I taught UNTIL my students learned it. The timing of the learning was variable, but learning WOULD happen.

1) Be a “warm demander.” I learned about this term from the book The 12 Touchstones of Good Teaching. It originates with researcher Judith Kleinfeld, who identified several types of teachers in classrooms she observed in Alaska decades ago and why students responded to some better than others. Researchers and teachers are drawn to this phrase because in a mere two words, it captures so much that appeals to many of us about teaching: the hope that relationships and content knowledge will support and build upon each other, making our students, and maybe even ourselves, smarter and better people.

You need to demonstrate you are loving, kind, and respectful—but also that you have high expectations and tight structures. And I mean tight! If you are absent, I want your class to be able to run itself as the sub looks on in amazement. That level of trust and self-direction can only happen if you’ve nailed the combination of supportiveness and expectations that “warm demander” describes.

2) Have a reward system. I know we’re supposed to encourage intrinsic motivation, not lean on extrinsic rewards, but I’m here to tell you, never underestimate the persuasive power of a sticker, even for high school students. Heck, I use stickers as rewards in professional-development sessions, and you should see those grown-up faces light up!

There are actually legitimate teaching skills involved in setting up an effective reward system. You need to be clear with the students, and yourself, about what behavior you’re trying to encourage. I like to reward academic effort such as studying hard for a test, as well as prosocial behavior like helping a new student get organized or picking up a piece of trash. If stickers aren’t your style, some options for these individual rewards could be a piece of candy, a no-homework pass, a cup of hot chocolate, lunch with teacher, tech time, or even going back and spending some time with a previous teacher they miss.

There’s a second level to a great reward system, which is to recognize cooperative effort. By blending individual, group, and whole-class rewards, you’re drawing attention to the multiple aspects of success and showing the students how to build collective efficacy, which is something that all workplaces need.

3) I hope this doesn’t sound petty, but have a clean, organized classroom. In my writing and consulting work, I talk a lot about creating an environment for learning, and in part, it’s an accessibility issue. As they take ownership of their learning, students should know where their learning materials are, how to get them, how to use them, and how to put them back. If you had drone footage of your class, you’d see dozens of bodies taking dozens of paths around the room, but it wouldn’t be chaotic at all. It’d be very purposeful and it would support the goal of individualized learning.

The Pandemic May Have Eased, But There’s No Going Back for Districts

Diana Laufenberg is a former teacher who currently serves as the executive director of Inquiry Schools, a nonprofit organization focused on supporting schools to become more inquiry-driven and project-based. She currently lives near the family farm where she grew up in rural Wisconsin:

My entry into COVID school was a unique one to be sure. At the start of the 2019-20 school year, I was asked by a local history teacher to sub for her from February through April. I was thrilled for the opportunity as I believe that returning to the classroom periodically is important when doing school-based consultancy work. This was the second time I was afforded this gift since 2012. I readjusted my travel schedule to open up flexibility for the long-term sub job and very much looked forward to a less travel-filled start to 2020. (That turned out to be one heck of an understatement.)

I was both teaching and consulting during the first months of the pandemic. This proved to be an interesting vantage point from which to observe all the different approaches and machinations being attempted to deliver school in new and unknown ways. One simple yet powerful concept that popped up consistently was that schools with established care structures (homeroom, advisory, family, etc.) were able to meet the immediate needs of students and families much more easily and effectively. Every student was already in a small group that was connected to a staff member.

This attention to the importance of having an in-school advocate and connection yielded incredible results when trying to find all the students and make meaningful contact with them in the initial days of the pandemic. I do see evidence that this feature is being incorporated more into school environments and given time to strengthen as school communities still struggle to bring back all the students successfully to the classroom. These kinds of classes for the students, including advisories or SEL-based homerooms, are highly recommended to support, connect, and advocate for each learner in your schools.

The second major learning point was the idea of flexibility and resiliency. Throughout the past decade, I’ve been asked what the future of education will look like. My answer consistently was … I have no idea. The only thing I was sure of is that the future will demand greater flexibility and resiliency in the systems and the people. Rigid systems cannot thrive with dynamic conditions. This is a fact. I think the most notable example is the state testing schemes that were undone by COVID.

The lesson I hoped would be learned in this moment is that a rigid system like state testing is not compatible with the dynamic conditions of a world still grappling with a pandemic years later. As we start the fourth school year affected by the pandemic, I have observed some moves that are encouraging on this front (summer learning that is much more experiential and inquiry-based) and others that trouble me (hyperfocus on “learning loss”). If you are in a position to lead a school or district forward through this, continue to ask how these decisions will make your institution more flexible, responsive, and resilient.

That leaves student agency. Students know that gig is up for school as it was. It’s time to truly invest educational time in the idea that student ideas, interests, dreams can have an integral and powerful place in their formal educational journey. What students think, their experiences need to play a prominent role in their educational path. Getting the students “back” means actually attending to the humans who present themselves to school on a daily basis. They are not a number, a stanine, a seat, a desk. … These are humans. Humans need systems and experiences built for humans. Increasing opportunities for student agency help solve the impersonal or overly institutional experience that many students endure.

Maya Angelou knocks around my head frequently as I work alongside schools to adjust, adapt, grow: “I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.” Let’s do better, folks.

Sally J. Zepeda, Ph.D., is a professor in educational administration and policy at the University of Georgia. Philip D. Lanoue, Ph.D., is a former superintendent and high school principal, and he is the 2015 American Association of School Administrators (AASA) National Superintendent of the Year. Philip co-authored (with Sally), A Leadership Guide to Navigating the Unknown in Education: New Narratives Amid COVID-19 (Routledge) and The Emerging Work of Today’s Superintendent: Leading Schools and Communities to Educate All Children:

When schools reopened, leaders faced issues ranging from addressing student learning loss to supporting new social-emotional needs of students and staff. There was little time to plan with any certainty. COVID-19 brought forward questions.

Should schools and their systems go back to pre-COVID days? While the turbulence created in response to COVID-19 thrust leaders and teachers into a dizzying whirl of continuous change, the more important question now for leaders is, “Will schools change as a result of what was learned from the experiences with the pandemic?” If districts return to the way they have operated in the past, then we have learned very little, missing significant opportunities to improve in ways to be successful in the ever-changing world that lies ahead. Now is the time to reinvent.

The journey ahead will be embedded as much in process as it is in program decisions. For systems to reinvent themselves post-COVID-19, leaders must understand the dynamics of internal change if they are to be successful in navigating constantly changing external forces.

Through our conversations and work with districts, we have walked away with some insights to help leaders anchor their work in adapting and responding to the ever-changing internal dynamics and turbulence. We believe that:

Systems now must be agile and adaptable and ready to pivot quickly in making changes through a lens of the often unknown. Returning to the rigid structures that framed how districts and schools operated will only create the same conditions before the pandemic where some children were successful and others were not, with the impacted majority being the groups that need schools to be successful.

Systems now must listen to the voices of teachers who learned how to make midcourse adjustments, redesigning different instructional models compared with “in front of the room” instruction. Agility and adaptability require teachers to have a new sense of freedom in stark contrast from structured curricular guides, unified instructional practices, and strict content timelines.

Teachers and leaders have new insights into the strengths and deficiencies in instructional designs based on student needs. Critical conversations must emerge from these insights to create new pathways for teaching and learning never scaled at this level.

Systems now must be attentive to the social-emotional needs of their teachers and leaders. Substantial social-emotional needs have emerged for students, teachers, and leaders. Students struggled with the loss of in-person interactions critical to the formative years. Similarly, teachers’ social-emotional needs surfaced and weighed heavily on them. Systems are experiencing a significant depletion of the teaching force by those leaving the profession that is exacerbated by those no longer entering teaching as a career.

Similarly, school leaders have felt tremendous pressure as they struggle with daunting challenges to keep students and teachers safe while maintaining effective learning experiences. Moving forward, systems will undoubtedly grapple with looming building-level leadership shortages affecting succession efforts for every school to have a highly qualified and effective principal.

Prior to COVID-19, the work of teachers was mostly misunderstood and often distilled to test scores of the students on their rosters. Throughout the pandemic, the true work of teachers could be seen, and they were responsible for showing the world hope, giving students much-needed support.

Systems now must prioritize the needs of students given the turmoil for them over the last two years, which has taken a toll at every level. While younger students are experiencing remarkable rebounds as they return, others are experiencing significant learning gaps in combination with much confusion about their learning trajectory and emotional stability. There exists an immediate need to address the magnified learning gaps and inequities as well as the social stress students face today which will leave the traditional approaches to addressing these concerns woefully inadequate.

We believe there are new opportunities post-COVID-19 that can reshape the educational space, but only if leaders and teachers examine what was learned about the educational and social-emotional needs of students and the teachers who have answered the call to work with them. In the end, the future of education and its success lies not in going back but solely on how we move forward in this journey.

July Hill-Wilkinson is a veteran classroom teacher, adjunct professor, and former administrator. She currently works as an instructional coach and curriculum leader in Southern California high schools:

Less. Is. More. The motto for too long has been “more is more.” More testing gives more results and more students in classrooms makes more room in the budget. Some have touted COVID as the reset button, even the needed wake-up call for an education.

When COVID sent us home for a year and half, there was definitely less learning, which is devastating and will impact all for a long time to come. Students spending less time with their friends was, for many, a black hole of isolation from which they have not yet recovered. Terrible, terrible things happened as a result of the pandemic, but it forced our hand when it comes to narrowing the focus of what students really need to know at the end of the day.

Online school made it impossible to do a lot of the activities and lessons that some of us have done year after year. We could not do group work or give students opportunities to feed off each other in whole-group discussions—not well anyway. There was so much adjustment that we simply didn’t have the time, space, or capacity to do the same things we always do, so we had to really, really think about what exactly made the cut.

We had considerably less time face to face with students, too, because no one in their right mind is going to have them on screen six hours in a row. Lecture times and independent work times were in a far different balance from what has ever been possible in public schools. Online schooling created a more collegelike and worklike situation for high school students for which they had to take responsibility for their own learning and their own time. They were not supervised every single minute of every day. We could offer small-group instruction in meetings and not have to monitor the behavior of 30 other bodies in the room. We could finally use time differently for those who needed support and those who aced material easily.

These situations could be repeated, at least in part, with some creative scheduling and planning at schools post-pandemic. Districts can guide curriculum teams to pair down to fewer standards that have to be mastered as opposed to dozens which are “touched upon.” Time and online opportunities could be leveraged to create the individualized learning 21st-century students need. Those who succeeded in teaching or learning in an online environment should have the opportunity to blend that into the return to the traditional. Do I think they actually learned them? Not enough. Not nearly enough. But I have hopes for changes to come now that we see what we can do with less.

T.J. Vari, Connie Hamilton, and Joseph Jones have experience as building and district school leaders. They have authored or co-authored nine books, including their most recent publication with Corwin Press, 7 Mindshifts for School Leaders. You can learn more about them at theschoolhous302.com and conniehamilton.net:

Wild change occurred during the pandemic whether school leaders were prepared to initiate it or not. So, what was the difference between leading during COVID that allowed schools to have the confidence, innovation, and dedication to commit to solutions?

We believe the lesson that surfaced during the pandemic is the way we think about problems. The mindset that emerges within effective leaders during a crisis is not one of can we or should we solve it but instead a laser focus on how we solve it. One by one, barriers to students accessing education were tackled by every school district in the country. Every one of them implemented strategies and structures that never would have been on the radar if we were not in a crisis. It made us wonder if a crisis mindset is a way of thinking that should be applied to our biggest perennial problems in education.

To some degree, many of our greatest challenges in education have been accepted as impossible to change or can only be addressed over a multiyear timeline. We now have experience that shows us that enormous problems can be tackled with massive change in lightning speed. Because the pandemic upended everything and created so much instability and uncertainty, district leaders were forced to think about problems differently and with a greater sense of urgency than ever before.

Some of these problems were new, like distance learning, but others were simply exacerbated, spotlighting the already inequitable circumstances for students. This exposure forced us to treat them like the crisis that they are and always were. These lived experiences have the potential to shift how we approach other problems in education, like teacher retention, equity, and school safety that, like a pandemic, cannot be put on a long-term plan for uncertain change.

There are other, more obvious lessons to be learned from the pandemic. Take, for example, student access to the internet at home. When everything shut down, students needed devices. Many districts had been slowly increasing their technology inventory but faced an immediate need to get devices to every single student. Suddenly, they were able to make happen what normally would have taken years. But students didn’t just need devices, they also needed internet connectivity. While this was a more complex nightmare, it was also solved, often through collaboration with community resources.

There is no denying that without a shift in thinking about these problems, many students would still not have devices or internet access at home today. It was the pandemic that triggered the shift. Again, a result of a crisis mindset.

Unfortunately, the numerous challenges that COVID-19 created also left many people craving “normal again.” We heard from educators that they couldn’t wait for a time when things got back to the way they were. There’s much to be said for the human spirit that soared during the pandemic and what we all lived through together, but our desire for normalcy shouldn’t bring us back to the same problems that we lived with prior to the pandemic. This would leave the benefits of a crisis mindset behind us and a retreat to an acceptance of issues in education that remain crises.

We are inspired by how a crisis mindset allowed us to achieve what no educator would have thought possible before the pandemic. What we’re most hopeful about, in terms of lessons learned during the pandemic, is the breaking of the mold for the way that we think about problems, both old and new.

Whether getting food to families whose kids weren’t in school or providing mental health services, communities came together to solve real problems. A new way of thinking emerged in those pandemic years. We hope that leaders, both within education and the community, will continue to look at old problems with a crisis mindset and not just treat them as perpetual issues that are never likely to change. Things can and will change, change doesn’t need to be slow, and we don’t need to snap back to a “normal” that includes suffering with problems that could be solved with the right mindset.

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Rhonda J. Roos, Ph.D., is an educational consultant coaching principals, district leaders, and administrative teams in the complex and ever-challenging work of leading schools. She is the author of The Deliberate & Courageous Principal:

One of the most important lessons that principals should have learned during the pandemic and should continue to hone in their leadership is the fundamental skill of bringing clarity to the work of their staff.

Effective leaders know their most significant responsibility is to provide clarity for the work ahead. Teachers have had to deal with so much, and the gift of clarity from their leaders should be given to each of them. Marcus Buckingham, a British author and business consultant, writes that clarity is “the antidote to anxiety, and that clarity is the preoccupation of the effective leader. If you do nothing else as a leader, be clear.”

During the height of the pandemic and now that it has eased, principals must take the time to fine-tune the learning objectives with teachers, let go of unnecessary work, and focus in on the essentials. Effective principals don’t sit and wait for answers from the district office; they don’t sit and blame the state for requirements and mandates; and they don’t make excuses for why they can’t get initiatives going at their school.

It’s easy for school leaders to spend entirely too much time thinking about the problems “out there” instead of the ones right inside their own school. Don’t waste time on things out of your control. Focus on the critical, essential, and difficult work for which every principal should be held accountable—the work of answering the ultimate question, “How are students learning and achieving in my school?”

In a book entitled That’s Outside My Boat (2001), veteran television announcer Charlie Jones tells the story of when he was getting ready to report on the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. He was incredibly disappointed when he was assigned to broadcast the rowing, canoeing, and kayaking events. In previous years, he had been assigned to the excitement of track and field, swimming, and diving. He had witnessed and reported on the amazing feats of Flo Jo in Seoul and Pablo Morales in Barcelona.

When he arrived in Atlanta a week before the Games, he began interviewing Olympic rowers from all over the world. He asked the basic question of, “What if it’s raining?” The answer was always, “That’s outside my boat.” Then he would ask, “What if the wind blows you off course?” The reply would be, “That’s outside my boat.” What if one of your oars breaks?” “That’s outside my boat.”

By the end of those Atlanta Games, he reported that they were by far the best of his life. Why? Because he learned so much. He learned invaluable lessons. He came to understand for those Olympic rowers that they were only interested in and focused on what they could control. They let the outside circumstances go. The rowers knew they had to dismiss the extraneous factors and concentrate all of their focus and talent on what was inside their boat. Other reporters questioned the teams about the rain, the heavy winds, the possibility of broken oars, and other negative aspects, too. But each team member consistently responded, “That’s outside our boat.” It’s another way of saying that the team was only concentrating on what was inside their circle of influence. They were determined not to waste any mental energy on things that could distract them from the real work they had to do.

Jones (2001) wrote, “It slowly began to dawn on me that my assignment was ‘outside my boat’ . . . the president of NBC Sports hadn’t called and asked me what I would like to cover; he had simply given me this venue. What I did with it was up to me.” Principals have been given a precious venue of their school. Effective leaders clarify the work—each and every semester—that needs to get done.They focus on specific areas until those are embedded and strong before moving to the next areas of work. These principals are building a solid base for continued achievement. As author Brene Brown writes, “Clear is kind; unclear is unkind.”