No matter what you do, you won't be ready for your first day as a teacher. Every teacher I've worked with or spoken to agrees on this. It didn't matter if we were fresh out of college or moving into teaching after working in another field, none of us had good memories about that first day at work, and the first five minutes of it have become a recurrent nightmare for more than one of the teachers I know.
You get advice, of course. Even people who've never taught a day in their lives will tell the freshly hired teacher that the secret is simple: prepare. But here's the thing: all the teachers I've spoken to did prepare. And they all say it didn't help them much.
Another thing is common in all the conversations I've had with my colleagues and friends during any conversation about that first day: “If only I knew then what I know now.” But obviously experience would help have helped us. The paradox is that we have to start without experience in order to start gaining it.
We all agree that we could have used some decent advice on how to deal with that first day. Most of us feel that we wouldn't have known the right questions to ask, but if we could have just been pointed in the right direction, that first day wouldn't have started so badly, and ended in such complete chaos. Simple things, like what to prepare, how to prepare it, and how to use it in class.
So with that in mind, I've decided to give out a few tips on how to get past day one, and on to day two and beyond. Much of what I'm sharing here I've learned through making the very mistakes I will describe - and through the years seeing how things have gone wrong in my class. None of us are perfect, and we will always make mistakes, so get used to the idea, and remember that the person who may well learn the most from that first day at school could be the teacher.
The Basic Advice
So right away I'm just going to give out the basic advice on what experience has slowly bashed into my head. I'll go into detail about these further on.
- The first day, the first morning, and the first five minutes. Those are key times, and they are listed in ascending order. You own those times, and you'll have a good year.
- Be very clear about your classroom routines before the first day dawns. Even quite mature learners don't respond well to too many changes in routine, and young learners are pretty much allergic to them, so you need routines that are good enough that they will cover many situations and that won't need to be changed too much through the year. Prep here will save you tons of headaches through the year.
Then, be clear that you'll need these things in bucketloads on that first day:
- Humility- to know that you're not going to get everything right.
- Patience- to realize that your learners aren't going to get it right, either.
- Flexibility- to see how your class is responding, and to work with their response.
- A good sense of humor- to deal with the entire process.
Two simple things
Now, on to the details. First up, you already know that there are really only two things that will help you through that first day of teaching - and they will remain true until your last day, so it's a good idea to get used to them early on in your career. They are:
- Prepare
- Be realistic about expectations. This is true for you and for your class: expect that you will make mistakes, and expect that your learners will, too. Then, be happy when you all get things right.
That's it. There's the advice that you could get from anyone, teacher or lay person. What you don't often get, though, is advice on how to prepare, and on what a realistic expectation of a lesson will be. So we're going to have a look at these two ideas in a bit of depth, and I'm going to share my personal knowledge and experience, and the knowledge I've gained from conversations with colleagues.
What to expect
This may be the first time someone has given you advice to lower your expectations, so I need to explain what I mean here.
Both you and your learners will be unsettled that first day, and you will not be able to get a great sense of their response to your classroom techniques yet. So you need to be realistic about what you as a teacher can expect to achieve on the first day: while you'll work miracles in class, it won't happen immediately. Get your groundwork done on the first day, and then build on it over the course of the year.
