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

The First-Year Teacher’s Survival Guide - Third Edition

By Julia G. Thompson

First, I would like to introduce the author of this book, Julia Thompson. She has been a teacher in the public schools for thirty-five years. She has taught at various secondary grade levels, teaching a variety of different courses such as English, geography, physical education and math. Her students have been diverse in ethnicity as well as in age. She has written many other books that provide advice on teaching and how to prepare first year teachers to teach. Some include: Discipline Survival Guide for the Secondary Teacher, The First-Year Teacher’s Checklist, and The First-Year Teacher’s Survival Guide Professional Development Training Kit (Thompson, 2013, pg xix).

As starting teachers, it is easy to familiarize ourselves with the content we are expected to teach via the curriculum and typical concepts learned in school, but we do not know very much about how to effectively teach, we do not know much about the students we are going to teach, or how to manage and organize ourselves to become efficient teachers. This book provides new teachers with advice and tips to manage a classroom, suggestions and strategies to help develop new teachers into skilled confident classroom teachers who remain enthusiastic about possibilities in every student (Thompson, 2013, pg xxii).

Thompson (2013) provides strategies, tools and activities within this book to help first-year teachers meet the challenges of each school day throughout grades K-12. She breaks the contents in her survival guide down into 5 chapter-like categories including subsections within these categories for better understanding and detail. The categories include:

I) Assume Your Professional Responsibilities

In this category, she talks about professionalism. Knowing what it means to be a twenty-first century educator and provides worksheets that help teachers reflect on their goals and observations within the classroom. The second section of this chapter provides suggestions on how a teacher can arrange their work area, tips on managing emails and other concepts such as saving paper. In the third subsection, she gives advice on networking and collaborating with other colleagues within the school and within the community.

II) Establish a Learning Community

In this chapter, Thompson acknowledges how the first day of school is important and how to overcome anxiety of the first day. She suggests learning your student’s names are quite important and necessary on the first day, she provides tips on how to rehearse student’s names. Within this category she also provides strategies to develop a positive relationship with students, which is essential.

III) Promote Student Achievement

In this section, she suggests our time with our students is quick and we need to make the best of it. She provides suggestions on how to pace instruction and effectively manage our time in the classroom. This chapter also talks about how to deal with issues such as student interruptions and how to manage the classroom, while enforcing rules and regulations that students should follow.

IV) Design and Deliver Effective Instruction

This section of the book includes benefits of careful planning, common planning problems, how to find time to plan and how to deliver engaging instruction. This chapter also provides tips on how to assess student’s progress and meet the needs of all students.

V) Maintain an orderly Environment

Lastly, this chapter talks about how punishment is not the way to prevent problems and how to prevent discipline problems. This section describes how to become a fair and consistent teacher, also how to manage these discipline and behaviour problems (Thompson, 2013).

This book provides so many helpful resources to help a starting teacher to be more efficient including websites we can visit for other ideas. I like the idea that this book is meant for teachers teaching throughout all secondary grade levels.  I also liked that she included many checklists and activities to help teachers stay organized, and her style of writing was mostly expressed through point-form bullets, which makes it easier to remember and understand the concepts. I would definitely recommend this survival guide to any teacher, whether they are starting off their new careers or have been teaching for many years. It provides a better understanding of why we should or should not do certain things we might think is right within our classrooms. I also think some of the material in this book is good advice and suggestions that we may not learn in University.

I really liked this survival guide and hope to use it when I start my career as a future educator. The book also comes with a DVD that includes the downloadable worksheets contained in the book, which makes it nice and easy to print instead of making photocopies of the sheets in the book. My only critique about this book is that it requires much time to read. Being thick and bulky like a University textbook, as starting teachers, we may not have the time to sit down and read this large resourceful book, but overall I really like the content within the book and find it extremely beneficial.

REFERENCES

Thompson, J. (2013). The first-year teacher's survival guide. (3rd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.