So…you want to teach.
So…you want to teach.
Teaching is the best thing you could choose to do with your career. By a long way. But understand that it requires enormous courage, persistence and work ethic. It is difficult, you will fail often and you will need to show plenty of fortitude and grit.
You will improve most in your first five years, after that not so much! Experience and time doing the job is clearly an advantage in those years, but it also means you had better be doing a lot of the right stuff early in your career.
Having a mindset for learning, throughout your whole career, will be the single most influential factor for you to improve year after year. The habits required for excellence take hours and hours to develop. It will be less about what you do and more about you wanting to be the best teacher you can be. There is plenty of great stuff to do, you just have to choose one thing and make a start.
You will have to be prepared to work on your classroom craft but at the same time you will need to do lots of reading, watching and talking with colleagues. If you are lucky your school will have structures in place to support your learning alongside a team you work with.
What should you start with though?
As a teacher there are just five things that you can pursue that will underpin any quest for excellence:
behaviour management
an effective instructional practice routine
using teaching practices that best help students learn
being able to check if students understand what you are teaching and what they are learning
and understanding the content knowledge needed for any lesson.
Those five things are all closely related, they are so intertwined that it can be difficult to isolate each completely. However there are habits particular to each that you can develop.