Veteran Teacher Advice for the First Year Teacher

Teaching! The best job, the hardest job. It makes sense why I get asked often for advice for new teachers. I have also been asked many times if I would recommend being a special educator to someone considering the field. My answer always has been and always will be YES – but only if you really know what you’re getting in to! 🙂 There are a few jobs, but not many, that truly capture your heart like teaching. You can love your law practice, feel passionately about financial planning, and a dedicated store manager, but your entire heart and spirit get wrapped up in teaching. Due to the fact that it’s literally heart work, there are some major pitfalls that you can easily get stuck in, especially at the beginning. Here’s a few pieces of advice for someone a little bit further down the path.

Set boundaries on day one.

At times, it feels impossible to say NO in teaching. You want to say yes to every committee, every after school obligation, every planning meeting, every tutoring opportunity. You want to stay after school for hours organizing and creating unit plans for your team. You want to come in on Saturdays so your room will be organized for Monday. STOP – full stop. You. will. burn. out. Yes, you! The most dedicated and passionate teacher on the planet. NO ONE is absolved from burn out. Set boundaries, determine what you can actually handle, and realize that at the beginning, it won’t be much! This is normal. Things take longer at the start of your career because regardless of how prepared you are, it’s all still new. Be confident in what you say no to, and extra sure about what you say yes to.

You won’t be great at everything.

Yup. It sucks. Many of us teachers are perfectionists, and it’s not easy to know that everything doesn’t always flow together perfectly and allow us to excel across the board at first. Creating a few big goals for your first year, and focusing on them, is a great way to manage your expectations of yourself without burning out from the starting line. Maybe you want reading groups to be really solid, or you want to focus holding great IEP meetings, or writing awesome behavior intervention plans. Determine those pieces, and let the other things just be what they are. It won’t all be perfect, and that’s okay.

Get off of Pinterest.

Pinterest-worthy classrooms make us basically drool – but do you know how much time and money goes into those color coordinated, themed classrooms?! Spoiler alert: a lot. And, it doesn’t carry much weight in the long run. When it comes to your formal observation and you have perfectly designed bulletin boards with cute fonts and color coordinated banners hanging on the windows, but your paraprofessionals are sitting in the corner texting and not taking data? Your administrators will NOT be impressed. Design your room with students in mind: have them create the decor, keep things simple and clutter free, and add a few cute touches to your teacher area to make you smile. It’s all you need.

Be flexible with your schedule.

Veteran teachers know the importance and the gift of loose plans. Having a plan is crucial – winging it usually ends in a flop of a lesson. But a totally rigid, time bound plan can also be a potential flop! Even with solid data driven instruction, we never really know how our students will respond to the lessons we teach. We need to leave room for revision, clarification, and teachable moments!

Have extra work, always.

In any classroom, you never know what could happen. In a special education room – you REALLY never know what could happen! Having some extra independent work for students to engage in if paraprofessionals are absent or you have to assist in a crisis situation can really be the one small factor in your classroom not turning upside down. Honestly, this is my biggest advice for new teachers since pacing was one of my biggest hang ups when I was new. I struggled big time in figuring out how long lessons would take. Having extra materials around was necessary!

Maintain positive home communication before day 1.

Parent communication is always a hot topic, and kind of obvious. But truly, creating a positive communication system with families before school even begins is such an easy thing to start to establish. Chatting with families about the way they like to communicate, what their communication expectations are, etc. can really help alleviate some of the more common barriers that often occur with communication down the line.

And at the end of the day… YOU were hired for this job. YOU were trained for this, and YOU are exactly the teacher your students need. So friends, that’s my advice for new teachers!