-
20. Evaluations
You are probably fully aware of how you will be evaluated as a teacher. If you are new to a grade level, a school, a district, or a state, you will most likely have more evaluations per year than someone who has been teaching the same grade in the same school for fifteen years. You also don’t get to choose the time and lesson for the observation so just understand when the administrator shows up to do the evaluation, he or she may not see the optimal lesson or activity. But, the evaluator understands that. There is a lot that can be observed by the interaction of the teacher and students. It’s also pretty easy to see if the teacher checks for understanding and if every learner is engaged or some are hiding from answering questions. An evaluator can draw conclusions about how a teacher corrects misunderstandings and inappropriate behaviors. It is also clear if the teacher is engaged with the learning or sitting behind a computer. It is obvious if the classroom is filled with anchor charts and materials that support instruction, if standards and essential questions are posted, and if technology supports the lessons. No matter what lesson is being taught, an evaluator can tell a great deal about how the classroom operates just by sitting in the classroom for thirty minutes. If your first walk-through indicates that differentiation was not observed, there is no need to write a long defense about how you just finished a lesson characterized by differentiation. That is merely a notation. It is a starting place. If you receive a 2, that means you are still developing in that area. If you receive a 1, there is an issue you need to address immediately. I have seen too many teachers panic over receiving a 2 as if they had just failed a major exam. If every category is a 3, sign off on it and continue teaching. If you receive a 4 in any area, congratulate yourself. As a new teacher, your goal should be a 3 but a 2 is no need for panic. It is just noted that you need development in that area. If you continue to score a 2 in that same area in subsequent evaluations, go to the administrator and ask for some help. Administrators are almost always seasoned teachers themselves who are willing to help you grow into the best teacher you can be. If your school has an instructional coach, it is her job to help you as well. Use the resources available to you.
Use the resources available to you in your building. In my many years as a PEC teacher, I never asked a teacher or administrator for support and was disappointed. They want you to succeed and enjoy working with your students. Administrators want faculty to grow the same way teachers want students to grow.
Pamela Webster, M. Ed., SPED
-
19. When an Administrator Tells You Something You Have Done Wrong; Just Own It.
Unless you are some type of cyborg, you are going to make mistakes. All humans make mistakes and it is the foundation of learning. When someone tells you that you sent the form home on the wrong day or you were not on your duty post by the time the bell rang, just own it. Be a learner mostly because you don’t know what you don’t know. The easiest to coach teachers are those who can take constructive criticism and make the necessary changes. Attempting to defend why you did whatever the way you did it just prolongs the conversation and angst and the administrator may make a mental note that you are more difficult to coach. There is great freedom in the response, “Thank you for bringing that to my attention. I will do better.” Conversation over. Angst gone. Offense duly noted. Changes will occur. Fun fact, the first three years you are in a school is really a probationary period. This includes new teachers and veteran teachers with any degrees or certifications. Within the first three years in a new school, it is very easy for a principal to decide not to offer a contract to a teacher for the next school year. After the three-year mark, there is a little more involved in justifying why a tenured teacher is not offered a contract. Usually it is substantiated in the classroom walkthroughs or formative evaluations. But when you are new in a building, you have a little more reason to perform better, more professionally, and be coachable. Yes, you are coming in with a vast amount of classroom knowledge about teaching, learning, diagnosing deficits, and special needs learners, but be cognizant of how much more you will learn in your first three years and by all means, be coachable. You are valued for your enthusiasm, your ideas, your contributions to the school culture but you are not perfect. Don’t be too hard on yourself. The most valuable thing you can be to a school is a LEARNER.
-
18. Ask All the Questions
For three years, you can get a ton of forgiveness for not knowing how something operates. When a principal hires a teacher so new that the price tag is still on her ear, she knows what she is getting. She is counting on your creativity, technology savvy, innovation, and enthusiasm to contribute to the culture of a school where children love to come and learn. As college graduates, it is presumed that you understand curriculum standards, can diagnose reading difficulties and understand the nature of the special needs children we serve. You may not know where to find an extra desk for the new student you just got this morning, or how many forms have to be filled out to request a field trip, or what to do with the money you collected for the Red Cross drive. Ask your grade level chair or a colleague. And when they ask you if you need anything, don’t say you are fine and then go home and cry. Every single veteran teacher was once a new teacher who was overwhelmed by learning the million things about teaching that you did not learn in college. Ask every single stinking question. Then be sure to pay it forward when you are the veteran and there is another newly minted teacher in your building. Oh, and the answer is always no until you ask.
I found this to be especially true as a PEC teacher. When I started teaching in 1974, fresh out of college, I taught in a small neighborhood elementary school and had a self contained EMR classroom (50-80 IQ). Every teacher in that building, except for three of us that were new that year, were veteran teachers. They used to say that ”They came over on the Mayflower. ” Back then you kept your attendance in the sacred-and-oh-so-important! school register; a big book where you hand wrote each name and the date, week by week, in blue ink pen . If you made a mistake, which was bound to happen, but not admitted, there was a veteran teacher on each hall who had perfected the technique of dipping your eraser in alcohol and Oh! So! Carefully “ erasing “the mistake with her gentle, tried and true soft strokes. Believe me, you will learn to cherish the wisdom, comfort and advice of those who came before you and have many of the answers to your questions.
Pamela Webster; M.Ed. SPED
-
17. Make Friends with the Secretary, Head Custodian, Media Specialist and Lunch Lady.
You may think that you want to quickly impress your grade level chair or rub elbows with the principal. Nonsense. The four critical relationships for a new teacher are the school secretary, the head custodian, the media specialist and the lunch lady. Those people run the entire school. I can promise you the principal has them on speed dial. Those are the people who can and will likely do the most for you. When you need a bookcase moved, an additional desk, a field trip form, books about simple machines, an absence report, a computer fixed, or you want to refrigerate some ingredients for a project you are doing later in the day, these are the people who can help you. They are support staff, but make no mistake, they run the entire school. They know where things are. They know what is there. They are helpful. Treat them well. When there are occasions that call for little treats, be sure to include them. They will eat out of your hand.
As part of the beginning of the year orientation with my PEC students, we travel all over the building to be sure they have an awareness of the many different places they will be in the course of a day or week. This includes, but is not limited to, the office, the lunchroom, the school gym, the school nurse, the restrooms and the media center. I have always found that the staff in charge of these areas want to know our students and will watch out for them, especially the custodians, who are all over the school.
Pamela Webster, M. Ed. SPED
-
16. Always be Professional
This suggestion seems rather benign. After all, you are college educated and working in a noble profession. If professionalism were easily understood and interpreted, there would be no need for a Professional Standards Commission. Every single year you teach you will have a faculty meeting with a long powerpoint presentation about things that happened to teachers that jeopardized their certificates. You will sign acknowledging that you had been given all the information you needed to act professionally. Yes, a lot of it is common sense but somewhere before you go on teacher retirement, you are likely to encounter some bizarre circumstance you did not anticipate that calls into question your fitness as an educator. I would not teach a single day in a school without joining a professional organization that offers you professional liability insurance. We live in a litigious society. People like to blame someone for things that happen to them. Protect yourself.
Professionalism does not just apply to your interaction with parents. It also involves your interaction with students, teachers, administrators, volunteers and community partners. By virtue of your position, you represent your school and your district. When you are shopping in a mall, working out at the gym or attending a ball game, you are on your own time but you are still a representative of your school and your district. It doesn’t seem fair, but teachers, by nature of the influence they have over children, are held to a higher standard than someone who serves coffee or checks out your groceries. Sadly, there is no expectation for the parent to be professional toward you but there is an expectation that your colleagues will be and in turn, they will expect professionalism. It is unprofessional to discuss a child, a family or another teacher in the hair salon! It is also ILLEGAL. FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) laws protect a student’s right to privacy (even when you are away from school and on your own time). It is unprofessional to have a phone conference with a parent in a public space where others might hear it. It is unprofessional to treat a child in any way that you would not want your own child to be treated.
In this day and age, social media can be dangerous for professionals. Yes, you have a right to free speech but what you say and especially when you vent anger or frustration, you will be judged by everyone who reads it. Every person on your friends list is not actually your friend. Acquaintances will send screenshots to “interested parties” if they have an ax to grind. If you use social media, be acutely aware of every picture you post and every picture of you that is posted. Don’t use social media as an avenue for venting or complaining about your job. Don’t use social media to make sarcastic remarks that someone might misinterpret. Certainly, don’t use a public platform to make threats or “send a cryptic message” to a single individual that is probably not reading it anyway. If you can’t be positive and uplifting in a very public forum, step away from the keyboard.
If you are an experienced teacher with a story or professionalism tip to share, please add it in the comments.
-
15. When Responding to Emails that are Upsetting, Don’t Send.
Email is the most common way of communicating between a parent and a teacher. Emails are tricky. First, they are permanent. You can delete them but they still exist. When someone sends an email when they are emotional or especially upset, it sets a tone for an exchange of words that is hard to escape. Finally, you can’t control the tone in which your response is read. As with the law, anything you type, can and will be used against you. When I receive a particularly upsetting email, I will generally answer with a phone call. That way I can make sure the tone is appropriate and my words won’t be picked apart (or shared on social media, or printed on the front page of the newspaper). Further, there is no electronic paper trail that can be forwarded to anyone who is not part of the conversation. Again, every child in your classroom is the center of someone’s universe and because you often spend more of that child’s waking hours influencing him or her, a balance of influence is needed. It is important for you not to call immediately when you receive the email because you need time to process the communication as well as the sender needs time to cool down. However, don’t wait too long to make the sender believe you ignored it. If you receive a hostile email in the morning, call after school but don’t wait longer than 48 hours. If you need help responding, ask your grade level chair, counselor or administrator. They are there to help you navigate the tricky stuff.
When I was a young teacher, I owned far too much emotional volatility than I deserved. I always thought that if a parent was angry and accusatory, it was obviously about me. Experience taught me that I was the one in the path of the storm instead of the one who caused the storm. You or your action is not necessarily the catalyst that prompted the hot email. The child is the center of someone’s universe and school is often the first place that serves a harsh reality that something is not right. It is not a bad idea to convey “hard to handle” information in person or on the phone. Reserve email communication for good news only.
-
14. Don’t Underestimate Metacognition.
Metacognition is thinking about your thinking. It is one of the first big and impressive words that is introduced to a young learner. It involves how you approach a learning task, how you choose to solve problems, monitoring your own comprehension and evaluating your own understanding of new content. It is important to get even the earliest learners to start thinking about their thinking and to validate that they way they think is okay. We often want our students to arrive at the same answers, the same way, when their brains are not wired for it. That results in some students feeling marginalized or feeling like they are not as smart because of the way they learn. Nobody is ever going to change the way you think or solve problems so the best thing to do is validate it and teach the students that regardless of how they think, learn and solve problems, they can be successful too. Teachers do a lot of thinking about how students learn. They can typically watch a child solve a problem and identify if the child is left brained or right brained. They can usually identify a child’s learning style as kinesthetic, visual or auditory. A teacher is usually the first one to identify auditory processing deficits and neuro-atypical behaviors in a child and teachers can certainly pick ADHD kids out of a line up. But teachers rarely let the child own their individual learning styles. This is why differentiation is so important. Our job is to make sure every child is successful. We accomplish that by having the learner’s natural curiosity and intellectual capacity work for us, not against us. In the early childhood years, we do so much evaluating children that we often inadvertently pigeon hole them into “needs math support” or “requires intervention.” I am not suggesting that we should not offer intervention to children who need it and could benefit from it. However, by the time they are old enough to get an extra math class instead of an elective in their schedule because they don’t do well in math, they begin to own the idea that they are never going to be successful because they “hate math.” Children as young as second grade should be able to articulate how they learn best and methods they use to solve problems. If we allow students to “think out loud” we can often zero in on where the deficit lies and immediately correct it. Once they realize how they learn best, you can offer multiple ways to demonstrate mastery. I guarantee if you use differentiation to your advantage, your students will score higher and be more successful, and that will ultimately be a positive reflection on you and your practice.
Knowing the dominant eye, ear, brain, hand & foot can improve the learning of any child. In addition, once they are armed with this information, they know where the best place is for them to stand or sit, in any learning situation, to be able to maximize their learning potential. Many years ago, I was working with a 1st grader who was really struggling with every aspect of learning in her classroom. I completed a Dominance Profile on her, which showed us her dominant eye, hand, ear and brain. I then drew a rudimentary picture of a typical classroom and asked her where she sat in relation to where the teacher did most of her teaching. Guess what we discovered? She was sitting in the worst possible place to take in information from the teacher with her dominant eye and dominant ear. When I explained this to the teacher, she asked me if we could do the Dominance Profile on the rest of her class, which of course, I did. The following year, when she was in 2nd grade, this student asked me to come into her class and explain her Dominance Profile to her teacher, so she could sit in the best place for learning, which of course, I did. After that year, she took care of it herself and is now a sophomore in college, still advocating for herself with great success!
You can get more information on Dominance Profiles in the book, “ The Dominance Factor: How Knowing Your Dominant Eye, Ear, Brain, Hand & Foot Can Improve Your Learning” by Carla Hannaford, Ph.D.”…
Pamela Webster, M. Ed. SPED.
If you are an experienced teacher with a story or tip about metacognition, please share it in the comments.
-
13. Noise is not a Bad Thing.
There are teachers who believe that absolute silence is the goal. Actually it is not. Literacy is the goal of early childhood and that involves reading, writing, speaking and listening. A perfectly silent classroom is immediately compromised. Children have learned everything they already know by interaction; not by merely listening to someone else. If your goal is silence, you need a new goal. Learning is often a noisy endeavor. That is not to suggest that you can be noisy enough to disrupt learning in the halls and neighboring classrooms. Learning just involves a lot of communication with a teacher as well as other learners. Just like we have to teach children how to make a genuine apology, we have to teach them how to use their volume effectively. You will often want them to discuss something with their small group or elbow partner. Practice an appropriate volume with one group. Then add all the other groups and demonstrate how what is reasonable when you only have four children often is too loud when it applies to twenty. Let the students help you decide the volume that conversations should be in order to hear the ones in their group while not disturbing other groups. Of all the things you have to teach and practice, volume is challenging. Children often mimic what is said and done at home and some families are more boisterous than others. The challenge is getting all of the learners on the same page when it comes to volume in the classroom without getting so frustrated that you opt for silence.
While it is true that some families are more boisterous than others, you, as the teacher, have the opportunity to set the tone for your classroom. Remember that children learn more from what we do than what we say. They are always watching and learning from us. If you speak to them with love and respect, and your actions are a reflection of that love and respect, the majority of children will want to be like you. Be consistent and demonstrate integrity since that is what you want the students to emulate. Don’t forget to use your “class chant” or reset. Create an environment that is relaxed and safe, and children will want to learn.
Pamela Webster, M. Ed. SPED
If you are an experienced teacher with a successful “noisy” learning environment, please contribute to the conversation in the comments below.
-
11. Develop Routines and Practice Them.
The value and development of routines is definitely taught in college. Where many new teachers miss the mark is in the practice of them. They are ready to get all that stuff out of the way and start teaching lessons. There are several books that tell a teacher how to handle the first three days of school but I submit that the first three weeks are equally as critical. Everybody memorized their math facts but they weren’t really learned until they were practiced. Practice lining up. Practice walking to the gym. Practice where you go for a fire drill. Practice asking for permission to go to the Media Center. Practice apologizing. Make up a million scenarios of things someone could do or say and ask the students if that is the “right thing.” Make it a game. Make it enjoyable. Praise how they have done it. Let students evaluate it themselves. Ask them how it could be better. The key to a student centered classroom is not in the development of routines but the practice of them.
For PEC students, this is extremely important. Again, many of our PEC students have a “high need for certainty”. They need to know how to line up in the classroom, where the gym is and how to walk there, what to expect during a fire drill and where to go, where to line up to leave the lunchroom, etc. Many of our PEC students are unaware of “personal space” boundaries and may get too close to another student, which could cause a problem or even a fight. Or, the exact opposite could happen….some of our students on the Autism Spectrum (ASD), do not like being too close to others, especially when in a line. I typically walked with that student in the front of the line, or at the end of the line. Acknowledge how your special needs students feel and validate it by accommodating those needs. Besides being the right thing to do, it will ultimately save you precious instructional time by eliminating the barrier that causes that one student not to be able to function. Many students on the autism spectrum are extremely bright but struggle with the inability to read non-verbal social cues or have repetitive or obsessive behaviors. To differentiate for these learners you need to modify the environment more than modify the curriculum.
Pamela Webster, M. Ed. SPED
If you are an experienced teacher with a story or routine tip to share, please add it in the comments.
-
12. Proximity Will Help You Manage a Group of Children.
When you arrange your classroom furniture, make sure you can easily get around every desk where a child sits. It is difficult for someone to misbehave when the teacher is standing right beside him. The teachers who sit behind a desk or table seem to have the most trouble with classroom management. You can offer instruction from any location in the classroom. Nobody wants the teacher standing right beside him so the best way for a child to change his behavior is to change your proximity to him. Many teachers think this means to drag his desk right up beside hers. That sends a message to all the other students that you will not hesitate to remove them from the group but it ultimately humiliates the student who feels like he has to explain to everyone who walks in the door why he can’t sit with everyone else in the classroom. It really is easy (and silent) to get up and go stand by the child who is making a bad choice and it certainly does preserve the dignity of the one struggling to do the right thing in the first place. Many teachers also don’t consider that when one child is humiliated or reprimanded publicly, it makes an impact on some of the children who are always compliant and obedient. Those children often hold themselves to a higher standard and they develop anxiety that they can make you angry enough to do that to them. Consider how that message will be received by the one it is intended for as well as the ones that it is not. Also, don’t yell. Sometimes we feel like we have to increase the volume in order to be heard. The louder you talk, the louder the children will talk. There are some groups of children that other classes always hear coming down the hall. They are typically followed by a teacher scolding them for the noise they are creating in the hallway when she is creating a lot of noise herself. The lower your volume, the quieter the children have to be to hear you. If they are working and you need to get their attention, use a chant or a class reset to get their attention. Wait until you can speak with a soft voice before you give directions. When someone does something totally inappropriate, go over to his desk and whisper to him. If you need to, take him in the hallway. Everybody does something inappropriate at some point but it does not mean they deserve to be yelled at or humiliated.
The use of a chant or a class reset to get everyone’s attention is a great tool for your “toolbox”. One example that is a tried and true technique is where you clap a short and simple pattern, and the class claps it back. Of course, in your classroom, you will have taught this amazing technique the first week of school. Train the students to know that some important information is coming immediately behind the clap so they will await further instruction. Proximity to your students is critical, especially your PEC students. They often need extra support and reassurance, and do not mind you being close by. Establish a quiet personal signal that they can use to get your attention when needed if you are not nearby. I can’t imagine any situation in the classroom where yelling is beneficial, unless it involves a safety issue.
Pamela Webster, M. Ed. SPED
If you are an experienced teacher with a story or a tip about using proximity to enhance classroom management, please share it in the comments.
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
Fire Drills 