Every teacher is required to have a college or university level degree as well as several months of work experience through in-school placements before they can start their teaching careers.
Despite having all of this prior experience, it doesn’t make starting your first teaching job any less daunting. It can be scary standing up in front of a class of students and teaching them new information, no matter how confident and comfortable you are in the classroom.
Whether it’s social distancing classroom ideas for remote teaching or lesson plan templates for in-class teaching, there are lots of things that can be extremely helpful when you are new to teaching.
As you go through your teaching career, you will pick up lots of tips and tricks on how to make lesson planning easier and how to encourage children to get more involved in their learning. But what if you could learn these tips and tricks prior to stepping foot in the classroom for your first lesson?
This article is going to give you all of the top tips and tricks that you need to know as a teacher. Let’s get into it!
Streamline the Lesson Planning Process Using a Template
As a teacher, you will be teaching multiple lessons every day. Most weeks, you will have very limited time to dedicate to lesson planning.
Due to having such limited time, many teachers plan their lessons during the evenings or over the weekends in their spare time. Therefore, streamlining the process by using a general template for every lesson will save you a lot of time and effort.
The veteran teachers at your school may already have a lesson template that they can provide for you but, if not, it should only take a couple of hours to create your own template. Once you have built your initial lesson structure, you can continue using this for years and years to come.
Perfect Your Classroom Management Skills
When the children in your class are being noisy and disruptive, it can be difficult to keep your cool. But practice makes perfect when it comes to classroom management.
You can’t always predict how the children in your class are going to behave but once you’ve perfected your management abilities, a noisy classroom will no longer phase you.
Classroom management skills can involve a variety of different things. It might be setting very clear boundaries and expectations, engaging your students in better ways, or investing in more classroom resources. It might be a combination of all three of these things.
Catching naughty behavior and nipping it in the bud as quickly as possible is also vital to your classroom management. It only takes one child behaving badly to cause several other children to follow suit.
Practice strict discipline with your class and find the appropriate solutions for tackling their bad behavior. Doing so will minimize the disruption to your students’ education.
Be Caring and Encouraging
To become a teacher, you need to have a great level of care and empathy. It’s a tough but extremely rewarding job and a huge part of this reward comes from encouraging your class to succeed.
Make sure to praise your students every time they do something well and avoid being overly critical if they do something wrong. Discipline is important but it should be approached with a caring edge.
Your role as a teacher is to encourage children to get involved in their learning and find positive lessons from their mistakes. Alongside their parents, they look to you for examples. They follow your lead.
Set a great example to your students and show them that you truly care about their education and well-being. This will help them to build a trusting relationship with you, which will aid them inside and outside of the classroom.
Promote Free Time
Keeping your lessons jam-packed full of activities is key to maintaining your students’ attention. However, you need to be careful not to overdo it. Children can easily lose focus and attention if they are being stretched too far in the classroom.
Finding a way to maintain the balance between learning and free time is vital. It gives your students a mental break in between challenging activities so that they can rest and recover.
Free time doesn’t need to be completely unplanned. You could plan a few different ‘stations’ for your students to choose from in their downtime. Stations could be arts and crafts, independent reading, or board games. These mental breaks also provide your students with the opportunity to explore their own interests.
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