Teaching advice part 1 - Observe others
There’s a lot of advice for new teachers. Leading up to my first year as a teacher, I was inundated with tips, suggestions, strategies, frameworks and ready-to-go resources. Although all of it was given with good intentions, it was difficult to find the few pieces of advice that were relevant and useful to me and my personality.
The following series of posts is my effort to distill the few pieces of advice that I wished I had taken to heart before my first day as a teacher. Since I was a TFA high school math teacher, many of these suggestions will be more applicable to that program, subject, and grade level, but I believe many could have a broader audience.
1. Find a ‘teaching recipe’ early - observe as many classrooms as you can
Many traditional graduate teaching programs have a requirement that students log a hundred or more hours of classroom observations before they even begin student teaching. TFA’s boot-camp preparation obviously have that much time, but that doesn’t mean TFA corps members can’t observe classrooms on their own - ideally in a classroom with a similar population of students as their assigned TFA region. Even visiting only a few classrooms during spring break or immediately after finals can pay a huge dividend later on.
Setting up a brand new classroom requires tons of non curriculum questions. Seating arrangements, classroom management strategies, routines to sharpen a pencil or use the restroom, ways to organize the tons and tons of paper that you collect in a day, etc. Having an efficient classroom that works with your personality is critical for gaining the respect of your students and maintaining sanity.
Most teaching advice books will provide you with plenty of options for each of these questions, but they almost never show how one interacts with another. For example, if you choose to arrange your kids in groups, then it might make sense to have group folders to make returning papers easier. It might also make sense to assign students to groups and attempt to motivate them using competition between groups. Putting students in groups can also mean that lecture based instruction may not work as well as you hope.
My point is not to suggest a strategy - there is no “right” choice for any of these, each teacher has to figure out what works for their particular classroom. I spent most of my first four months as a teacher, mixing and matching strategies and procedures, trying to find the fit for my classroom. But the best way to figure out what combinations work is to visit the classrooms of other teachers and see how they mix together these ingredients.
Through observation, you may find a perfect teacher that you want to model or may you may only pick up a few ideas, but comparing these ‘recipes’ before you actually start teaching will give you a head start on finding the mixture that will work for you.
