New Teacher Support

Posted by Dorit Sasson

I wished somebody told me how important networking and collaborating was during my first year as a Junior High school teacher. Teaching at the elementary school level in Israel, I was all on my own and I rarely was presented with opportunities for sharing except during in-service teacher courses. The minute I made the decision to transfer to teach middle school, I was all alone, this time in the cold.

I had one particularly good teacher friend who acted informally as my mentor as we discussed my difficult groups of lower performing students and together, we came up with possible tactics for overcoming the challenge.

Unfortunately, teachers' meetings were another story.

During that year, I was constantly taken over with the need to survive and carefully observed the management and work styles of other teachers so much that I didn't find my own voice as a teacher. At the meetings, I was silent as a fish. It was only towards the end of my third year, where I began to feel more comfortable and share a bit more.

What I am trying to say is this: teaching involves also a lot of social learning. There will be times when you need to be silent and just observe and that is okay as well. But never underestimate your own light as a teacher. You've experienced things slightly different than others and that is just as important.

Posted by Dorit Sasson

I'm just at the very beginning of understanding this entire issue of teacher certification and frankly, it's much more complex than I imagined. I understand the requirements for meeting teacher certification vary form state to state, but I'm also learning that certificaton of teacher education programs offered at colleges and universities are not enough for me to be "qualified" to teach at a public school.

In Israel for example, where is a growing dearth of English teachers every year, the requirements for meeting English teaching have become virtually nonexistent. The standards for keeping English teachers are disappearing, and many teachers are still not certified!

I checked the website on ESL certification in Pennslyvania. It's still forever confusing to me. When reading about the requirements for ESL certification, the website wants teachers whose degrees come from an accredited institution of higher learning (like my own) to complete a TOEFL (Teaching of English as a Foreign Language) test. Now, why would I need to do that?? I've prepared students of English to take standardized tests for 12 years and I'm a native English speaker. Sounds strange! I've tried to ask this question more directly, but without much success.

So, if anybody has any experience about teacher certification and ESL certification in Pennslyvania, I'd love to hear it. You can either send me your insights in an email or, via the comments section of the teacher certification article above.

Posted by Dorit Sasson

There no secret recipe for getting through classroom observations. Seasoned teachers are used to this 'shadow' but first year teachers are just getting settled. I remember the first classroom observation visit. I had prepared a doable lesson plan on phonic and whole language. It was an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) lesson for fourth graders. It was at a point where I was experimenting with various teaching techniques of whole language and phonics, which were typical of the reading wars of the 1990's.

Thinking I had perhaps taught too phonically, the English inspector categorized the lesson into three main ideas:

• student participation
• teacher preparation (lesson plan)
• classroom management
• organization of the English classroom

She didn't just hand her report and leave. She explained how certain elements could have been improved but praised positive elements as well.

From her I learned an important thing: always accentuate the positive; it's the only way you'll really grow as a teacher.

Posted by Dorit Sasson

Building student-teacher relationships is a lot like dough rising. You need time for them to develop and often these relationships ddetermine the quality of learning outcomes.

You see, I'm spending a great deal of time on teacher forums and message boards reading a great deal about teacher experiences and they remind me so much of those earlier yearrs when I tried to impress my students (and myself among others) with a dazzling lesson plan. One big helpful hint I've learned through and through is to try and plan your own lessons first without looking too much for information from the Internet. I have learned that it can distract me from focusing on what it is that I really need to develop. Once I had a challenging group of ninth grade learners who had virtually little study skills. They were poorly motivated and there was frequent noise and discipline problems.

I was constantly looking for ideas on how to motivate them, but the real learning experience came when I opened myself to the realization that they thrived when I opened to discussing topics they were interested in rather than bringing in my own recipes. Becoming a great teacher is focusing on making your weaknesses (iework for you rather than finding that magic recipe.

For more information, please read:

• issues of classroom management
• issues of classroom organization
• quick and easy to implement lesson plans and ideas

Posted by Dorit Sasson

In order to plan an effective lesson plan unit, you'll need an abundance of tools and worksheets for teaching various skills and themes. As a first year teacher, I needed to know what was out there, so that I could eventually formulate my own ideas. Who says you need to build everything from scratch? And most importantly, why should you pay any money when there is so much stuff online?

I'm always on the look out for free worksheets. So, I think I have found an appealing site of free worksheet makers for a first year teacher audience. Maybe seasoned teachers would also find these free worksheet makers refreshing. In fact, you can surf on this site forever.

For starters, you'll need weekly assignment generators. Then, you'll most likely need to plan your lesson units. This should help you get started. Continue navigating through this free online teacher resource that I've used countless number of times for my own classes over the years.

When generating your worksheets always remember the skills you want to teach and any enabling skills that are needed before asking students to do let's say, a research project. You'll need to check-up on how well they've acquired their knowledge through a brief quiz or test. A lesson unit always has at least one small mini assignment and homework. You may want to implement a project in lieu of mini-assignments.

Best of luck!

Posted by Dorit Sasson

In 1995, I worked as a counselor for an English summer camp for elementary Israel children in an Upper Galilee town named Rosh Pina. I was also an in-service teacher at the time so I was learning lots of hands-on practical activities and tools.

It was good to see an informal side of education that I didn't see as a full-time elementary school teacher and not as a camper. Even though I had an entire booklet of information to help plan the daily schedule, I was expected to organize activities, arrange and coordinate events between groups. This structure complemented beautifully the rigorous world of grades, authority and frontal teaching I was expected to carry out.

It wasn't however until I was able to establish my authority as a classroom manager, that I was able to implement some of those activities from the summer camp days as a counselor. The activities included end-of-the-year games which offered a refreshing break.

Some summer teaching jobs have more of a teaching routine than others. If you're looking for a break from the classroom, it's good to keep in mind those kinds of jobs that can complement the teaching (ie. informal side) in some creative and interesting way.

Posted by Dorit Sasson

There are so many types of activities that give the impression they are information gap activities. Take for example, communicative activities. For some reason, teachers, both new and seasoned, seem to associate information gap activities with speaking when it comes to learning one of the language arts or ESL. This however is not necessarily the case.

As I mentioned in Vocabulary Learning Games, there is a considerable amount of planning involved in a 15 minute information gap activity. While it's true that students like working in pairs and speaking, that is not the only skill that should be considered when planning a lesson using information gap activities.

A task should focus on something, on a specific goal. There are many exercises that you as a teacher can do in order to foster practice of speaking for example, through specific skills. Such activities take much more time and should include maximum participation. Plus speaking needs to be balanced with one of the more recpetive skills like listening or reading.

In terms of methodology however, an information gap should be part of an overall pedagogical consideration in terms of how to cater to methodology by means of making it meaningful, interesting and flexible.

Posted by Dorit Sasson

Effective Communicative Methods

The goal of the communicative approach is to have the student communicatively competent which means using the language to communicate, which is the most effective way to learn a language. Here are four major principles of communicative methodology for lesson planning.

Effective Communicative Techniques

Know what you are doing. The starting and end point of every lesson should be an operation of some kind which the student might actually want to perform in the foreign language. of course, this communicative trigger for eliciting students' responses should be tailored and adapted to meet the students' skills and abilities.

Example of a communicative activity: Asking open ended questions, wide enough to generate a variety of responses. Relating to current events could be a good starting point.

Communicative Learning

Learners learn by doing or in this case, speaking. Avoid random corrections of errors and allow students to share their ideas.

Information Gap Activities

The communicative information which is transferred is of the interpersonal (social) type rather than the factual.

Example of a communicative activity: Student A has pictures and student B has words, which when fitted together create a puzzle. In an ideal information gap activity, both students need to communicative and share information.

Remember: a mistake is not always a mistake. Grammatical and phonological mistakes hamper communication. However, a learner who makes mistakes because he or she is trying to do something he has not been told or shown how to which he has not yet mastered, is not really making a mistake at all.

Posted by Dorit Sasson

I just started using Skype software development known for calling mobile to mobile, telephone, and videoconferences in order to recently teach Hebrew. Teaching languages online in this respect, is not dependent on online language software to do the trick - that is, if you can manipulate the technology to teach a language you know proficiently well to another.

I design the lessons around a few greetings and since the learner is a beginner, I introduce the characters, the vowels and finally I go over the meanings. I control the pace, how much I want to review and the amount of new material I want to present. The learner has the opportunity to ask as many questions as she wants. I can hardly say it is excessive. It gives my student confidence to know that she can finally recognize the Hebrew characters is a variety of word related contexts and ask questions about it. It's a very personal experience.

I send files via skype and she can relate to the instructions and explanations right as she's learning the language. We use the chat and speaking option so, she can match the print to speech, which is important for the early stages of language learning.

Posted by Dorit Sasson

When I taught last year in my school, I asked my studients how they felt about tests and how they made them feel. 88% of the students said tests created a great deal of anxiety and put them under a great deal of pressure.

Teachers for the most part largely overlook the possibilities of alternative assessment. I agree: there is one major area of discomfort, which is trying to find the right tool of alternative assessment.The best way is to start small by distributing questionnaireas around small tasks or even asking a mature and cognitively ready class that know your teaching habits what kind of tasks interest them such as group or pair work, research projects or portfolios. Finally, what topic interests them? Asking these types of questions creates more learner involvement, which is the ideology of alternative assessment.

Alternative assessment Tests



Kids make up their own test questions based on the material you have taught them. You provide a rubric for how you plan on assessing their questions. Kids interact with the material and become "experts." You then choose the questions and it becomes their test. They can also be responsible for marking it depending on how much control you want to give your students.

Depending on how open you are to the alternative assessment methods, you can also incorporate oral presentations, or other meaningful performance assessments such as projects and open your standard based curriculum even more.

If you still haven't decided however to incorporate a performance based assessment and still have questions or concerns about it, feel free to email me.