You’ve landed your first teaching job, Congratulations! These are some tips on how to prepare for your first teaching job so that you can start the school year off right.
Your first inkling might be to decorate your classroom and come up with a theme for the school year. However, it’s a good idea to leave that for last. Read ahead and follow these steps to be ready for the school year ahead, once you receive the keys for your classroom.
1. The first step in preparing for your first teaching job is to organize and clean your classroom.
This is a step that is usually taken for granted but will save you tons of time once you start teaching. The previous teacher, if he or she was in your new classroom for a long time, probably as a lot of stuff. I would go through and see what materials I could possibly use for the upcoming school year. Here are some additional tips to help with cleaning and organizing your classroom.
- Sort and organize all the books in the classroom in a way that is easy for kids to access, once you do this, you’ll see what you need to purchase for the year.
- Draw a rough sketch of how you would like to set up your classroom including where you’ll put whole group, small group, library, centers and so forth.
- Scholastic has free resource where you can play with classroom set ups virtually and you should also read The Organized Teacher, which has some great tips on getting and staying organized.
2. Become familiar with the curriculum to help with preparing for your first teaching job.
This is so important. Talk to your principal and see if you can get login access to the school’s curriculum/pacing guide.
Look through the units, find out your focus areas for your grade level. Read the books that students will be assigned to read, if you’re working with older grades.
If you’re familiar with the curriculum, you won’t spend hours trying to figure it out when you’re lesson planning.
3. Create a classroom management plan that prepares you to manage your classroom on the first day.
This is also one of the most important things you can do because it will save you lots of time and energy. You can read more about classroom management here.
You can check out my free classroom management letter template to help you get started and the Silver Lined Classroom Training on the topic.
Harry Wong’s book the First Days of School is another great resource to help you, it is a must if you are a new teacher.
4. Set up your digital teaching portfolio.
You can add artifacts as you teach throughout the year if your portfolio is set up. I wish I had done this over the years because I would have had a virtual body of work to demonstrate my capabilities and accomplishments.
Collecting artifacts becomes so much easier, just through everyday teaching you will be able to collect artifacts to place in your portfolio.
Summary:
- Become familiar with the curriculum
- Clean and organize your classroom
- Create your classroom management plan
- Set up your digital teaching portfolio
What are some of your tips you have on how to prepare for your first teaching job?