Chronicles of a First Year Teacher

In this blog, you’ll find that I am instructional support and coaching to two first year teachers: Max Cole and Marcos Hernandez. Despite their teacher preparation programs, you’ll find out that these new teachers are caught off guard by the realities of teaching. They become very focused and consumed with the day-to-day routine of teaching. There is little time to stop and reflect on their experiences however, my hopes is to change that with this blog. It is not uncommon for new teachers to spend up to seventy hours a week on schoolwork. Particularly overwhelming is the constant need to develop curriculum. Veteran teachers routinely reuse excellent lessons and units from the past. New teachers, still uncertain of what will really work, must develop their lessons for the first time. Even depending on unfamiliar prepared curriculum such as textbooks is enormously time consuming. The first year of teaching is definitely a big challenge when someone is trying to survive the storm. It is critical that we assist new teachers and ease the transition from student teacher to full-time professional. If we recognize this phase that new teachers experience, it gives us a framework within which we can begin to design support programs to make the first year of teaching a more positive experience for our new colleagues. Reflecting back over the year, new teachers can highlight events that were successful and those that were not. They can think about the various changes that they plan to make the following year in management, curriculum, and teaching strategies. The end is in sight, and they have almost made it; but more importantly, a vision emerges as to what their second year will look like, which brings them to a new phase of anticipation and commitment to teaching.