I can very clearly remember my first year as a teacher in Far North Queensland in the early 1990’s. As it was so very far away from my home here in Toowoomba and such a very different community to what I was accustom to, it took me a great deal of time to settle in.
Thankfully, the class I had were beautiful (if not challenging) and I was very much able to throw myself into the teaching aspect of my life. I was also lucky to have a principal who made efforts to include me in the community in a variety of ways.
But it was very isolating and very lonely. I did not cope very well with this aspect of existence and struggled at times personally. For you, what are the key things that you can do to help you support yourself as a beginning teacher? What are your concerns? Share your ideas about what you think your first year will look like.
Thanks Rod for your video. I always think it is an astounding fact that so many teachers leave the profession so soon after graduating… and your video provides a fabulous synopsis of a range of reasons that might cause this as well as strategies for coping with your first couple of years. I do think it is important to realise too that a learning and teaching degree is still a valuable commodity and there are loads of opportunities for teachers to use their skills in other areas outside of the classroom too. Like you I also had a wonderful first couple of years of teaching with wonderful colleagues who were incredibly supportive, able to answer questions and provide suggestions for great resources. I loved team teaching episodes and made sure I grasped every opportunity open to me, even though I felt nervous and self-conscious about my own practice and didn’t necessarily feel comfortable putting myself ‘out-there’. I love satisficing as a strategy for perfectionsim!
Hi Rod and Lisa,
Thanks Rod for the video. I know there will be support out there, I just have to seek and ask for it when I’m in need.
My greatest concern would be dealing with parents. There are parents who won’t accept any negative comment about their child. I have a friend who says her son is the sweetest boy and would not cause harm to anyone. According to my daughter (who is in the same class as my friend’s son), the boy throws stuff around the classroom, likes teasing his friends, and has been sent out of the class a few times. My friend thinks the teacher does not like her son and therefore picks on him.
I will have to learn how to communicate with such parents.
My personal space that will help me switch off from school work is my family, my involvement with the local SES, Uniting Church and my basketball.
Wendy.
Hi Wendy,
Yes dealing with parents is certainly an increasingly difficult process and you may find you will need to set very strict boundaries with parents about when and where it is acceptable to discuss student concerns. I have seen some parents enter a classroom mid-lesson demanding teacher attention and time. I have always found that being open but firm with guidelines early on helps set expectations. If in doubt with your reactions to parents, use active listening techniques to show you are listening to their concerns and then save your reactions for a later time when you can think through the issues carefully and seek guidance. Great that you have got guidelines for maintaining your own personal wellbeing. Teaching can be problematic in this sense as there’s ALWAYS something more you could do. But personal sustainability is important, you can’t be a great teacher if you are burned out or not enjoying your career. It’s a balancing act.
Thank you Rod. That was a great perspective and I enjoyed the aspect of bringing a personal touch to it. My main concern at the moment is the subjective nature of teaching. It might be difficult to know when you are doing a good enough job. I guess it will be something that will take a while to grasp. The first semester out of university may feel long as well, as you are probably teaching a class for a whole year or more, unlike in practicums when it is a relatively short time. Lesson observations are very useful at the current stage, however, this will not be as frequent an occurrence upon graduation. To me, the main way to support myself is to still enjoy my hobbies when in the first year.
Thanks Rod for reflecting on your teaching experience and providing us with some strategies to cope with the first year of teaching. Many of those strategies I think apply to my studies right now regarding asking for help and not self-isolating, but particularly the one regarding ‘good enough has to do’. I think particularly what resonated with me is that striving for perfection is not feasible given the nature of the work. This is something I struggle with currently and while on professional experience I find myself concentrating on what I did wrong, not what I did right. So my take-home message from this presentation is to keep striving to improve, but also be realistic about what can be sustained as your own mental health is very important.
Hi Kellie,
I am glad you have already deployed some of the strategies mentioned. To be honest, I wish someone had told me these things when I was a preservice teacher :-). The notion of taking care of yourself is really important. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs tells us that we cannot aspire to higher endeavours if our basic needs are not met. This applies to the teacher as well as their students. We need to feel safe, happy, rested etc. before we can do our jobs to the fullest of our abilities.
So taking care of yourself and being willing to settle for the best you could do at the time, are paramount to being a successful teacher.
Cheers
Rod
Thanks, Rod, so true: if it’s not given to you, go look for it go get it yourself. My last two pracs have been with 25+ year teachers who I’m sure were fine teachers of their classess, but not ITE mentors at all. I went and found information for myself. I imagine it will always be like that as that is all I have experienced.
Thanks for this video Rod. I am sure I am not the only pre-service teacher who has a thousand different feelings about finally getting into a classroom and teaching!
I worry about setting boundaries, and ensuring that I do find the work-life balance that works for me and my family. I’ve heard some awful stories of parents emailing teachers at all hours with demands and questions. Just being able to set clear expectations and boundaries from the get-go with parents will hopefully help with this.
I was talking to one of my on-campus under-graduate students during the week. She has a Permission To Teach starting next term in Central Queensland. She was telling me how nervous she was about it all and that she really was not sure she was ready. My response was pretty to the point. Every single one of us that is or has been a classroom teacher has taken that first nervous step into the classroom on our very first day of teaching. You have to back your training and go with your instincts. You have all the tools and you have trained to use them, now it is time for the real thing. Be kind to yourself and trust yourself. Setting expectations and boundaries with your students AND your parents is at the very heart of success as a beginning teacher.
Isn’t it a sad indictment on *some* teachers that they are willing to send their least favoured (and most difficult) students into a composite class for a brand new graduate teacher to manage? I find it very hard to believe that a principal would allow this to happen, particularly if they are a regional / remote school that struggles to attract teachers. Surely they would want to look after the new teachers that head out there? It certainly explains why so many younger new graduates leave the profession so soon. Thankfully I’m a bit older, a parent and have quite a bit of other professional and life experience, but this would have broken me as a 20-something new grad.
Hi Jamie, this was one of my own personal experiences and I have seen it repeated a few times.
This, for me, was not a negative experience, to be honest. The group of students I ended up with were the ones that needed a passionate teacher most! I was only 21 or 22 at the time I think, but embraced the differences in this group and the challenges they posted and used it to build a strong sense of community. I would often tell the students “You know you are the best class at this school, don’t you?” and they believed it and lived up to it.
You can learn a great deal when placed in such situations, about teaching, about students and about yourself. Of course, you need to be willing to see it in this way and be open-minded, take responsibility and embrace the opportunity whole-heartedly.
Cheers
Rod