Teacherhacks’s Weblog

This list of tips for new teachers was submitted by veteran teachers who’ve been around a while. It covers a wide range of topics.

• Be nice to the secretaries
• Watch out for the parking policies, coffee policies, and smoking policies
• Running a class is like an airplane trip. The danger usually lies in the “take-off” and in the landing.
• No one into your desk. It compromises your authority.
• For other teachers who complain alot, play a game I call “It’s really a Lot Worse Than You Realize.”

It’s a long list and by the time your read the last one, you’ll probably have forgotten the first one. Pick out 2 or 3 that might apply to you and make a point to try to apply it to your classroom.

Miscellaneous Tips To New Teachers

Here’s a neat idea for starting the new school year off from Education World: Ask parents to tell you about their kid in a million words or fewer. You’ll probably learn alot more than you ever wanted to know about some of them, but you will have an instant way to connect with every student in your class. You can learn about hobbies, problems, strengths, outside stresses your kids face, health issues, and lots of other topics that you can use to build rapport with students. It won’t take you long to pick out the potential troublemakers in the class. Knowing something personal about them can help you connect with them which makes discipline much easier.

Of course, you’ll likely have some kids who never bring the letter back. A simple reminder phone call to the parent might help. You could offer extra credit for returning it or if a parent just won’t do it, have the kid write it. You’ll still get to know more about the student than before.

In a Million Words or Fewer…

Open house, or “meet your teacher night,” is often the first chance you’ll have to meet your students’ parents face-to-face. Some schools schedule this before school starts while others have an open house within the first few weeks of school. No matter when you have it, you must be prepared. If parents show up and see teacher who is unorganized, out of control, and/or clueless you’re off to bad start. You need parental support, especially for the students who may act up in class or get low grades.

Here are six ways to have a good open house:

1. Have a handout ready when they walk in the door - Have a well-prepared handout for parents that highlights the important info about your class. It gives them something to do besides stare at you while your waiting to get started with your speech. If they get bored listening to you talk, the handout might distract them.
2. Know what you’re going to say - Parents want the basic information: schedule, homework, grades, discipline. Put a list of topics on the board and stick to it. The lets the audience know what you’re going to talk about so they don’t ask questions about stuff before you cover it. If they’re bored, at least they know how many more topics they’ll have to suffer through.
3. Highlight major (fun) projects - Parents can say to their kid on the way home, “Doesn’t the volcano project Mr. Smith talked about sound like fun? He must be an awesome teacher.” Don’t spend time talking about the boring book work you have planned.
4. Be positive about everything - This is a first impression. Don’t blow it by being negative about anything. Your class is great, the textbook is wonderful, the principal is perfect, your school is awesome, your district is the best. Don’t complain about anything.
5. Use a form to get contact info - Have a brief form to get basic contact info from parents. Hopefully you can get their email addresses. If they cared enough to come to the orientation, you should care enough follow up with a thank you for attending. This makes your first correspondence to them a positive one. They’ll be much more likely to be on your side later when you have to send home a note about little Johnny’s disruptive behavior.
6. Use humor - Don’t start with, “A teacher walks into a bar…” but do use humor. Alot of parents have memories of mean, boring teachers from their youth, don’t remind them of that by droning on and on about rules and policies and consequences.

Every January, normal people make resolutions for the upcoming year. Teachers are not normal people. Our new year starts in August. Before you look ahead to the new school year, first look back at last year.

Did you make resolutions for last year that you didn’t keep? Did you have great plans to stay organized, manage student behavior, and keep your class on track? Figure out why things didn’t work out. What stopped you from doing what you’d resolved to do? Did you have a plan to achieve your goals?

Once you figure out what stopped you last year, you should be in a better position to make resolutions you can actually keep this year.

What are your new school year resolutions? And more importantly, what are your plans to keep them?

Nearly every teacher sends home a letter to parents at the beginning of the school year. Send home a letter with misspelled words and grammatical mistakes and parents will think, “Great, my kid’s teacher is an idiot!”

Make a great first impression by writing in plain English. Some of the topics covered:

• Keep your sentences short
• Prefer active verbs
• Use ‘you’ and ‘we’
• Choose words appropriate for the reader
• Don’t be afraid to give instructions
• Avoid nominalisations
• Use positive language
• Use lists where appropriate

How to write in plain English (PDF)

You might also want to use this list of alternative words (PDF).

Note: This is a British site so some suggestions may need to be adjusted to for plain American English.

Block Posters lets you take any image and blow up to be huge. Here are some examples. This is a very cheap way to decorate your classroom, especially if you’re not paying for the printer ink.

This would be great for covering those concrete block walls that are found in alot of classrooms. You could have a different poster for each unit you teach.

This would also be a great way to decorate the walls in your school’s hallway to highlight class activities, pep students up for the big ball game or embarrass a coworker. Some other uses for these large pictures:

• Add a single block of the picture to the wall each day until students can guess what it is.
• Put all of the blocks up out of order
• Place each block in a different location around the school. Then make up clues related to the topic that leads students to the blocks.
• Use an embarrassing picture of your principal. Then anonymously send him/her one block each day

How would use these in your classroom?

Block Posters

Some schools are out already but alot have another week or two left. This site has a collection of end-of-the-year activities and ideas.

Year End Ideas/Projects