Useful Tips for New Teachers to Better Manage Their Classrooms
The teaching profession is exciting and demanding. Like other professions, teaching is a lifelong learning process to acquire new skills and to enable each student to develop their career. Quite simply, daily, teachers also learn, they experiment, test themselves, seek, and of course make mistakes.
Here we will present the mistakes that new teachers (even old ones too) make:
Managing indiscipline in the classroom
Lack of discipline is a global phenomenon that threatens the quality of education. According to a survey, 17% of class time is spent on managing classroom discipline. That is to say, on average 10 minutes lost in each lesson. If you give up on this, you will be unable to control student behavior. Most young teachers feel less able to restore order and manage a classroom.
Moreover, there is a link between academic success and discipline in the classroom. This is because teachers need to spend more time establishing an orderly environment before they begin teaching. On the other hand, for teachers who succeed in managing discipline, their students can concentrate on studies.
Possible solutions to help young teachers establish discipline: The teacher’s personality has a direct influence on the climate of the classroom and the maintenance of discipline in the classroom. The key concepts of a positive teacher-student relationship: empathy, respect, authenticity, and self-availability.
Avoid being friendly with your students
The relationship between a student and his teacher is the key to academic success, especially among the youngest. The bond that the teacher creates with students will have a decisive influence on their school career. For example, feelings of trust and effectiveness of the teacher have a positive impact on the academic performance of young people.
However, the teacher must maintain a certain distance from his students. He can have a special relationship without talking about friendship. We cannot speak of friendship, because the difference in age, experience, and knowledge means that teachers and their students belong to two different worlds.
Besides, it is not better to be friends with your students on social networks. Quite simply, the teacher must realize that he is a teacher, in a way, full time. It is illogical to write his personal life on his Facebook wall. So he must not flaunt his private life, otherwise, he will be ruined.
Cooperate with the parents of the students
A good educational relationship with the parents of the students contributes significantly to reducing academic difficulties. That is why the teacher must establish effective means of communication to make parents partners in the success of their children.
Indeed, communication with parents is an opportunity for teachers and parents to express themselves on children’s progress, their difficulties, and their expectations to find common solutions to the problems encountered. It is also a way to create a bond of trust, to avoid any misunderstanding, and to prove to parents that the teacher cares about their child.
Besides, the teacher must exchange regularly with the parents. It would be important not to let problematic situations drag on, and thus to prevent false impressions from settling in the minds of parents.
Get the students to work
During the lesson, try to make your students work. It is better to put the student in action. The teacher is a learning facilitator. You launch the concept and the students get to work. The teacher, for his part, worked upstream to make this possible by defining the instructions, by providing the tools. However, the idea is that the students work and be active because learning is not done as a simple transmission of thought. Without the activity of the student, there is no learning.
Dare to ask for help from experienced colleagues
Former teachers know the school better and certainly have the expertise, ideas, and tips to share. So, don’t be afraid to ask for help from your colleagues at the same level or those from other levels.
Faced with the difficulties of teaching, with the difficulties of engaging learners, the teacher must develop certain strategies. This is why new teachers must accept help. Most young teachers don’t start with a lot of resources.
Stop striving for perfection
In the field of education, we must accept that everything is not perfect. Besides, being a perfectionist is a real problem that prevents you from sharing with other teachers the difficulties that you encounter regularly. We have to take into consideration that everyone makes mistakes, and that’s what allows us to learn and improve. Your professional journey cannot be reduced to success. It is through failures and imperfections that we become better.
