10 Great Pieces of Advice for Beginner Teachers

All of the experienced teachers have once been novice. All of them remember how hard it was to enter the classroom on the first day of the school year, meet the students, try to manage the classroom and take responsibility for students’ learning. It is not as easy as it sounds. You need to be ready in all aspects possible: ready to deliver productive classes, ready to answer unexpected questions, ready to deal with unpredicted situations, ready to work with a team of professionals, manage curriculums, etc.

There are some things starting teachers can consider though to make the integration process easier and less stressful. Let’s have a look at some pieces of advice which can make the job and the adaptation process of newbie teachers easier.

1. Plan ahead

When just starting to teach, it is quite challenging to do the exact planning. You need to know the pace at which the students learn on average, the material you’re working with, the duration of the assimilation, etc. The best thing you can do here is to plan ahead to make sure you won’t have a lack of material during the session. Even if you don’t manage to cover all you’ve planned, you’ll have a chance to do it during the upcoming sessions.

2. Check out the “must DOs”

To make sure you manage to cover all the required material the school curriculum has adopted, create a complete syllabus you’ll be using throughout the year. Leave out the details but do include the key things you have to address. They can be the required writing types (essays, emails, reports, etc.), tenses, expected level ups, etc. Doing this will let you see the bigger picture, zoom in and zoom out to achieve the set targets and give the learners a chance to have an upgrade in their language skills.

3. Create a PDP plan

If you’re new in teaching, you’ll definitely feel the need to improve your professional skills. Understandably, it will increase your chances of delivering more successful sessions, recording better progress results, etc. There are many PDP courses worldwide aside from the regular workshops and sessions that your schools will provide. Some of the most famous ones are CELTA, TEFL, TKT, etc.

4. Collaborate<

Being new in any team calls for creating contacts, befriending colleagues who will help you adapt more easily. Collaborating with your colleagues will help you understand the culture of the school, the peculiarities of the company, etc. It will also help you share the experience with more experienced teachers, learn from them, and use their advice to deliver more successful classes.

5. Don’t compare

Although it’s very important to collaborate with your team and ‘older’ teachers, it is by no means a good idea to compare yourself to them in all aspects. Remember, times change, technologies change, nothing is 100% true and not everything that your co-teachers do in their classrooms will work for yours. Don’t forget that you’re an individual and have your own style of teaching. If you try to copy the existing methods and approaches directly to your own teaching, the results will be the same or in some cases worse. Your primary goal needs to go hand in hand with methodological developments and be flexible to change and adapt things to your classroom.

6. Don’t give up

At times it will be quite challenging, things will seem not to work out due to hard classroom situations, decisions to be made, the workload, etc. It’s important that you don’t give up and remember that we learn from challenging situations. Just take a moment, reflect on the situation and try to learn from it.

7. Don’t overdo

When just starting to teach, it’s quite popular for new teachers to take up more responsibilities than they can. They volunteer for everything, register for numerous workshops, try to overplan and manage students’ learning in minute details, etc. Remember, best teaching happens when the teacher is relaxed and not burnt out. The teacher should be a facilitator rather than an immediate responsible person for everyone’s learning 100% of the time.

8. Be friendly

Subconsciously we expect the teachers to be distant, non-communicable, strict, etc. However, we all know that students learn from teachers who they trust and are not afraid of. To gain students trust, apart from delivering brilliant classes, it is also a must to create good relations with the learners. Creating a favourable and friendly learning environment will surely benefit the learning process. However, note that friendly doesn’t mean friends. The borderline is quite thin and if you want to keep the level of professionalism make sure it is not crossed.

9. Encourage student interaction

With the development and changes in teaching methodologies, it has become crucial to change the shift of teacher-student classes to student-centred ones. To do that, it’s important to encourage student interaction as much as possible. Remember that students need to talk more than you do, especially if you’re a teacher of foreign languages. Practice makes perfect, doesn’t it?

10. Ask for help

When in loss, ask for help. It is OK not to know everything, it is OK to be stuck and not know how to react to a specific situation. There are people who can help you find the right solutions which in turn will help you grow as a professional and as a person.

In a word, teaching is a very rewarding job. At times it’s hard, at times it seems impossible. When feeling so, take a second and remember how it makes you feel when your students show progress and grow. Relax and enjoy teaching!