Wednesday, 12 March 2014

Carly Russell - The First-Year Teacher's Survival Guide



The First-Year Teacher's Survival Guide  
by Julia G. Thompson

Summary:
The book The First-Year Teacher’s Survival Guide by Julia G. Thompson is split up into 17 sections that are written to help in basically every aspect of your teaching career, the book is specifically geared towards your first few years as a teacher. Throughout the book there are templates and worksheets that are available for teachers to print off and use in their daily teaching. Each section is organized in the exact same format which allows for easy navigation.
            The first section titled “Know What It Means to Be a Twenty-First-Century Educator” is about the challenges teachers face professionally in the classroom everyday and what we can to do to overcome these challenges. Another aspect of this section is the importance of peer observation and how this beneficial for you to grow as an educator. Learning from mentors and role models is a major part of the teaching process. Julia Thompson also talks about the best ways to track and make goals as a professional and finally there are a couple of pages with tips on how to best manage stress that you may encounter with a career in teaching.
             Section 2 is titled “Develop the Practical Skills You’ll Need to Manage a Classroom”, which as it sounds, it explains how to organize your classroom in the best way possible. Anything from how your desk should be organized to what materials (jars, boxes, etc.) you should collect to allow for better organization and classroom use. A portion of this section is dedicated to time management; the best way to manage the many school tasks that you will encounter. It also talks about proper use of any technologies available to you in the school. Examples are how to use a school computer or how to maintain a class web page. To finish this section there are points about any classroom safety issues you may encounter throughout the day and tips on how to proceed with them. Section 3 called “Collaborate with Others in Your School and Community” is all about the importance of working well with other people in the school community. Julia talks about strategies and techniques for working with others and how to engage appropriately with social media. Among others things, Julia writes about tips to handle a variety of parental or guardian types, such as a helicopter parent, as well as what these parents expect from you as their child’s teacher.
            The 4th section is titled “Begin a Successful School Team” which focuses on the first couple weeks at the beginning of the school year. With things like what to do on the very first day, how to learn your students names as quickly as possible and how to steer away from big mistakes at the beginning of the school year. In the 5th section, titled “Develop Positive Classroom Relationships” it’s all about how to create an environment in which the students feel confident and comfortable with each other as well as with you as the teacher.
            The 6th section is called “Control Class Time” and it is about how to use the students class time as effectively as possible. For example, the best way to start and end the school day, tips on how to handle any interruptions to the school day and how to effectively pace lessons throughout the day. The 7th section is related to the 6th and is called “Manage Your Classroom”. It talks about how to keep a well managed classroom with a focus on classroom policies and how to effectively enforce and maintain those policies. The 8th section titled “Motivate Students to Succeed” is focused on ways in which teachers can motivate and encourage their students to well on school. Among many other topics, this chapter talks about how a teacher with a positive attitude will get positive results from their students and it also covers the topic of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.
            Section 9 called “Choose Appropriate Instructional Strategies and Resources” is evidently all about the variety of resources available to teachers as well as instruction techniques available to teachers, for example, hands-on instruction and blended learning. Section 10, titled “Design Effective Instruction” is about how to plan instruction using your time wisely, creating unit plans and daily plans as well as how to adjust a lesson plan. In the 11th section called “Deliver Engaging Instruction” the author writes about how to effectively instruct a lesson as well as examples of activities and games to help engage students.
            Titled “Meet the Needs of All Your Students”, section 12 is evidently focused on how to create lessons and instructions that will support learners of all kinds as well as descriptions of different types of learners. Section 13 called “Assess Your Students’ Progress” talks about summative and formative assessments as well as how to track students’ grades. There is also information about how to deal with students cheating in the classroom. Section 14 is titled “Level the Playing Field by Covering Basic Skills”. This section is focuses on a variety of necessary skills to teach the students, including media literacy, listening, speaking, reading, vocabulary acquisition, critical thinking and writing skills.
            “Prevent Discipline Problems” is the title of section 15, which is about creating a classroom environment with little to no discipline or punishment problems. Part of this section is about the importance of consistent and fair classroom management as well as tips on how to help students show respect for others. In section 16, titled “Manage Discipline Problems” Julie writes about expectations you should have for your students regarding discipline as well as responsibilities and expectations you have as a teacher. There are also tips on how to deal with misbehaving students. The 17th and final section titled “Learn to Solve Classroom Problems” is about problems associated with a variety of aspects in the classroom. For example, problems associated with individual students and behaviour during instruction.
Critique:
            This book is written for both teacher who are just starting out their careers and for veteran teachers with years of experience. Julia concludes with a note about how even though all the challenges brought on by your classroom, you will discover how rewarding a career as an educator actually is.
            Although this book is American, I found it to be an excellent resource for teachers, especially those who are just starting their careers. It could be read from cover to cover, but it would be likely be more beneficial for teachers to keep the book on their desktop to refer to at anytime during the school day. The detailed table of contents makes it a very easy book to navigate and it enables you to quickly find the section you are requiring guidance in. I really liked the way each section was divided up; it starts with the ideas about strategies and techniques with worksheets and templates for teachers to print throughout the section. Each section finishes off with a very useful checklist which includes the major points from the section and there is also a “Time to Reflect” part at the end of each section, which encourages you to think more deeply about issues covered throughout the section.
I found that there are many aspects of this book that support the theories that we have outlined throughout the course. There are a few theories or aspects of this course that I found stuck out to me more than others and these theories were also included in Julia Thompson’s The First-Year Teacher’s Survival Guide. The first is about the importance of planning lessons and instructions based on the knowledge level and interests of the students in your current classroom. The second theory focuses on the fact that there are a variety of learners in the classroom and so teachers need to plan their lessons to accommodate all learner types. The third theory I found to be important was based on struggles with discipline in the classroom.
In Julia Thompson’s book, section 10 is all about how to effectively design and implement instruction plans in your classroom. The focus is mostly on how to organize your time to plan lessons for the school year, but one part is titled “Assess Your Students Prior Knowledge”, which I think is incredibly important. It’s important because we don’t want to teach students at a higher level than they are ready for and we also don’t want to teach at a lower ability level because this will not be beneficial to their learning. I think that while asking students about what they already know about a variety of topics you can also find out their interests in order to plan your lessons to incorporate their interests. This was one of the big themes of our course. “It’s about the tasks that intrigue us, that tap our curiosity and connect to the things we care about, that we tend to keep doing -- and get better at doing.” ("'Well, Duh!:’ 10 Obvious Truths That We Shouldn't Be Ignoring," (Kohn, 2011)) It is important to pay close attention to students interests and whenever possible, include their interests in lesson planning. Always try to adapt lessons and activities to the students in the classroom; because it will be a much better learning experience for the students and the atmosphere of the classroom will be much more engaging. I feel that this idea is what Julia Thompson was getting at in this section.
            Throughout this course we talked a lot about meeting the needs of all the students in your classroom, particularly in the chapter “Learner Differences and Learner Needs”. I found that Thompson supported this theory in her text, especially in the 11th section titled “Meet the Needs of All of Your Students”. She acknowledges that this is a challenging thing to do but she lists many strategies to take in order to accomplish it. For example, she suggests being flexible in your lesson plans, offering a variety of options for completing tasks in order for accommodate for all learner types in your classroom. Oftentimes we tend to associate “special needs” with students who struggle academically or who suffer from a learning disability when in reality there are so many more learning needs. “Learner Differences and Learner Needs” focuses on “gifted children” who are also considered in this category based on their extraordinary abilities and talents. All learner types require the same amount of attention and educators must plan their instruction to accommodate all such learners. I thought Julia Thompson covered this theme quite well in her text.
            The third theme that I found to be important in our course is based on the struggles educators have with discipline in the classroom. I find it incredibly challenging to be consistent when disciplining children in a classroom because most times you must make the decision right on the spot so there is very little time to think about how to discipline at that particular time. Thompson covers this idea in section 15 of her Survival Guide where she gives strategies for creating and maintaining a classroom environment with little to no discipline problems. There is an emphasis on the importance of being consistent with your discipline techniques in order to remain fair. I think that teachers must pay particularly close attention to students who act out in class because there is likely to be a reason for their acting out. I find this section of the Survival Guide to be a great resource for developing my discipline techniques in the classroom. I know that I will definitely be referring to this section throughout my teaching career, especially to use the Teacher Worksheets that refer to preventing discipline problems in the classroom.
            Overall, I found this book to be a great resource for teachers, especially those who are just beginning their teaching career. The pages of this book lay flat which makes them very easy to photocopy, which I know I will be doing because the checklists, worksheets and reflection sections are all very useful.

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