Helping A New Teacher
How a Teacher Mentor Can Help You in your First Year of Teaching
What happens when you've had a bad lesson? New teachers in their first year need a teacher mentor to help guide and support him or her in this overwhelming year.
Teachers starting out can become easily lost in a big educational system. The sink or swim syndrome still prevails in many educational systems. But you as the new teacher, are not alone. For every new teacher, there is a seasoned teacher who has been there, done that and can share a few tips of the trade in order to prevent you from sinking too deep.
This illusion of not having enough teacher control typically results from a lack of classroom experience. Lesson plans can look good on paper, but the success of them depend largely on maintaining an effective classroom management system, largely based on communicating rules and procedures. Any well prepared and seasoned teacher can tell you that, whether it be online of offline.
So what can a Teacher Mentor do?
An online or offline teacher mentor offers the best gift to a new teacher: objectivity. Mostly likely, you will be telling him/her classroom situation s/he has experienced before. It is a good idea to sit with your lesson plan and reassess your objectives. What went well? What didn't?
A Teacher-Mentor Checklist - Troubleshooting issues.
Teacher mentors can start by helping with a preservice teacher's lesson plan. The lesson plan itself - was it properly built?
- Was there sufficient time for practicing the new skills?
- Did pupils cooperate in the learning tasks? (try and isolate the main contingents for discipline problems)
- Was there a balance between learning and teaching?
- Was there a diversity of learning tasks and teaching methods?
- How could you tighten lesson openings and beginnings?
- How could activities be shorter? Longer?
- Was there enough transition or 'glue' between each part of the lesson plan?
- Was the subject motivating enough? How could you motivate them differently?
- Did the students have enough familiarization with the subject content?
- How could you get more attention? What classroom techniques can you try to improve your classroom management?
It is up to you to bring a list of concerns about your lesson plan. Don't wait for the teacher mentor to discuss it or bring it up. You are your own catalyst for change. Try to come up with a few techniques and tactics to implement for the following lessons. Report back to the teacher mentor either in person or through a written form of correspondence such as a dialogue journal and take it from there.
Together, evaluate the classroom outcomes together with the written contents of your lesson plans. You might be pleasantly surprised to find that your class didn't go as badly as you thought.
