What Makes a Good Teacher?
Should a New Teacher Continue to Teach a Second Year?
New teachers have a lot on their minds especially in their first year. What ways are there to stay motivated and focused rather than to quit and leave the profession?
New teachers have a serious decision to make after the first year of teaching - should they stay or quit their teaching jobs? Of course nobody can answer that except for yourself. However, keep in mind the various implications involved in your decisions. While you might never know if you made the right decision to leave after your first year, a second year of teaching might give you the bigger picture you were missing in the first year of teaching.
So what is the bigger picture?
1. Beginning the first year is full of unique experiences. All new teachers encounter difficulties and cope in different ways. In your second year, you have already established your class rules and procedures of classroom management, one of the more difficult areas new teachers have to deal with.
2. Don't get discouraged. Each year gets easier as you go along. The more you learn, the more you will impress yourself and your school.
3. If you have had struggling issues about your work as a classroom manager, opening up to your experiences as a classroom manager by reflecting, using simple exercises can put your unique first year into perspective.
4. You come to know yourself as an educator and a teacher as you go along. By building on a first year experience, you are actually paving the way for getting to know yourself as an educator and building yor own ideologies and values.
5. Pre-service teachers are still trying to get a handle on transferring theory to practical methodology. The first year just gives you a small taste of that type of experience but once you develop your own classroom routines, you can then experiment with practical methods that eventually will speak to you.
6. In the second year, you will learn how to develop your own approach to teaching and learn to make the most of your personality in the classroom.
Being open and industrious are good assets for beginning teachers. Hopefully, your own experiences in the classroom will help you put your energies into good use as you make the decision to continue to teach a second year.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that keeping level and open about the problems you faced during your first critical year of teaching builds for foundations of success as you grow into this very serious, important yet demanding profession called teaching.
How have you dealt with your first year of teaching? Feel free to start a discussion so that all new teachers can benefit and learn from your experiences.
