In the fourth part of our Tips for New Teachers series, we welcome back newly-qualified teacher Rachel Daw, who shares some of the tactics and tricks that have helped her through her first few months as a new teacher.
Some Tips for Surviving the First Month (Part One)
I’ve now been teaching in my school in Berlin for over a month, which still seems rather unbelievable to me! Although I’ve not been teaching for long, I have already taught a lot of different classes at a variety of levels, both within the school and in companies. In this short time, I feel I have picked up a few tricks and tactics to make the life of a newbie teacher a little easier, so I’d like to share them in the hope that they might help others in a similar situation.
1. Use teacher’s guides… alongside your own ideas!
At the very beginning (especially if you came straight from a CELTA into a full-time job like I did!), try to use textbooks with teacher’s guides where possible. You won’t be able to do this every time, of course, but the following is an excellent post-CELTA test of your understanding of the different important components of a lesson and a coursebook: look at the textbook pages yourself and decide how you would introduce, adapt and teach those specific pages. Then compare your plans with the publishers’ suggestions and see how they would do it differently. Use any good ideas from your original plan and incorporate the publishers’ alternative suggestions, as the plan you devised yourself will always ‘come off the page’ more in a lesson than simply following the publishers’ instructions letter by letter!
2. If you can, look at a range of coursebooks
On a related note, try to assess a few different coursebook options for whichever grammar or functional item you are interested in, and practise rejecting inappropriate options critically. For example, my classes of adults won’t be at all interested in topics about school, so if a Contents Page tells me that’s how my desired grammar item is introduced or practised, then I reject that particular book for that lesson. Of course, this is much easier if you are graced with a huge bank of resources but even with a few books you can learn to be productively picky.
3. “Can I get back to you on that?”
Keep a note of all the tricky questions your students ask, and be sure to find out the answers afterwards – ask colleagues for help if Google or books aren’t clear. I’ve already come up against questions about incredibly intricate grammatical points in my first four weeks, and ‘it’s just right because it sounds right to me as a native speaker’ doesn’t really cut it as an explanation.
4. Admin isn’t your enemy!
In my current school, we have fortnightly plans for our intensive courses, which change regularly. We also have to document which materials we used for every lesson, so they’re not repeated for students who stay on the intensive courses for a long time. These folders then become the perfect place to look for suggestions for similar lessons because you can see how other teachers taught the same lesson to another group. Logs like this aren’t just time-consuming admin!
5. If at first you succeed, do it again… better!
If you teach a lesson that your students seem to enjoy, teach it a few times to perfect it. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise I could simply recycle my successful lessons from intensive courses with my company classes – and of course vice versa.
Keep an eye out for the second part of this blog post, which will be published on Cambridge Conversations in two weeks’ time!
A version of this post previously appeared on Rachel’s own blog, Berlingo.