Many new teachers are baffled when they see experienced and seasoned teachers acting in control. They think the best way to be a successful and confident teacher they’ve always wanted to be is to imitate other teachers’ teaching and classroom management styles.

The real secret is - to make sure you have two important elements in place for your 2009 teaching plan: a working classroom management plan and a plan to teach in a style that comes naturally to you.

Of course knowing what to teach is just as important as HOW to teach which is why I’ve written a special teaching report as you aspire to keep on track with your teaching goals.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

If you’re spending too much time on managing the classroom, how exactly are you organizing your teaching plan?

How are you using your lesson plan to engage your students more effectively?

There is just no way you’ll be able to become a successful and confident teacher if you don’t find the spark that lights up your students.

So, get on the ball!

Start engaging your students more effectively from the moment they enter the classroom with slef-directed classroom systems and engaging activities. If you need someone to look over your lesson plan and coach you on your classroom management strategies, I’ll be more than happy to let you know HOW you can gradually introduce more engaging elements that increase productivity and your own self-fulfillment as a teacher.

Simply sign up for an individual teacher coaching session and I’ll help you get right back on track.

Take control in 2009!

It’s tough enough for new teachers to juggle between classroom management and lesson planning.  Discipline problems can often wear you down leaving you stressed and doubting your successes. Here are ten ways to help you become that empowering teacher you’ve always aspired to be:

1. Start your day doing something completely different. One teacher I knew got up early every morning to jog a few miles before entering the classroom. It can be as small as reading a few pages in your favorite book or even meditating for a few minutes.

2. Always leave blocks of time you set aside to catch up on yourself. As a new teacher, you need time to “see” where you are. The same also goes for seasoned teachers.

3. Build upon your students’ intrinsic motivation and create lesson plans that cater to their learning styles and interests.

4. Have a new teacher support plan for building 2009 teaching goals in order to ensure that you are constantly on track and working towards your teaching success. See this post on a working 2009 checklist to help get you started.

5. Decide on a mission statement of purpose as a teacher to help you decide what to do and to plan your day. This mission statement will help you avoid getting bogged down with small insignificant details of school life.

As a teacher trainer, my mission statement is: I want to inspire and empower classroom teachers.

6. Do something every day to help nurture positive relationship with your students. It can be as small as smiling to the class or conducting a tutorial with a student.

7. Bend the routine a bit from your traditional lesson plan. Introduce the topic by showing the class a movie (with guiding questions to answer afterwards) or tell your students a story.

8. Lesson planning tips: Experiment using different ideas and activities. Your students will appreciate this.

9.Share your lesson planning and classroom management successes with your staff or during an in-service training day.

10.  When planning lessons, offer options and choices for students whenever possible. This empowers them and helps build self-confidence by having them do what they know. 

For more tips, Check out Suzanne Lieurance’s A Dozen Ways to Build Your Confidence as a Writer, which can also be applied to ALL teachers.

Happy holidays and have a successful and happy new year of eternal peace and full of blessings!

Wow - I can’t believe the end of 2008 is approaching already. As the countdown to December 31st begin, I always get excited for the new year and a whole new year full of wonderful possibilities - do you?

I always take a little bit of much needed “me” time in December to reflect how far I have come as a teacher, a writer and a person. As a teacher trainer, I encourage all of you to take time to reflect on your progress. Suzanne Lieurance from the Working Writer’s Coaching Program has a nifty three-question technique she uses to help her sum up her year:

• What worked?
• What didn’t?
• What’s next?

Don’t forget - Be honest!

To help you GET ready to see the big picture, set three major goals for next year. Use the S.M.A.R.T. technique to monitor your progress. You must write your goals and revisit them so you’ll know.

Once you’ve evaluated your goals, you MUST follow through with the right actions. My working 2009 checklist will help you correspond the right actions with your initial goals so that you will keep yourself on track all throughout 2009.

So what are you waiting for? Try it. And remember, you can be a successful and confident classroom teacher!

Are you ready to have the best 2009 year yet? Do you have a system for keeping yourself on track with your 2009 teaching goals?

If your answer is ‘no,’ chances are you’re letting time and other curriculum constraints get in the way of having a productive and fulfilling teaching career.

So many new and experienced teachers start out the New Year either writing (or thinking about) some teaching goals but don’t really follow through. Start the new year off right with a system that will help you keep on track. A working checklist includes those teaching goals and actions that are important for maintaining positive relationships with your student while teaching effectively.

What you’ll find in this special report:

• Why it is important to have a checklist for teaching success
• What should be included on your checklist
• How to use your checklist for teaching success
• Questions to help you refine your teaching goals

Until December 31st, you can purchase any teaching report including this one for 50% off! Simply click here to receive the discount. But don’t delay! This offer expires December 31, 2008, at midnight.

Hello teachers,

As you may or may not know, my coauthor and I are writing a book on how teachers develop literacy of ELLs (grades K-2) through collaboration and we would appreciate it very much if you could assist us with understanding how general education and ESL teachers collaborate in order to support their struggling ELLs.  

Ultimately, we want to give teachers guidelines on how to collaborate more effectively using key areas of oral instruction since there are virtually none for teachers. We’ve included our questions below. If you wish to be quoted in the book, please leave your name, name of school and/or district. Please let us know what grades you teach if you are a general education or ESL teacher. If you wish to remain anonymous, please let us know.

Thank you so much for your willingness to participate in our research project. Please email your responses to sasson92 at gmail dot com. Thank you!

-Dorit Sasson and Tracie Heskett

QUESTIONS

1.Do you feel your teacher training program adequately prepared you to work with ELLs in your general education classroom?

2. What have you done to deal with issues you have encountered with your ELL students?

3.How do you define a struggling ELL in either your ESL or general education classes?

4. How do you use / refer to ESL standards?

5.What are some different formats/configurations of ESL / ELL programs in your school?

6. What techniques of oral instruction do you use with your ELLs? (read-alouds, vocabulary review, etc)

What was your purpose for using these techniques?

7. How did you differentiate oral instruction to support your struggling ELLs? Explain.

8. Have you collaborate with other ESL/general education teachers on the subject of oral instruction?

9. What other teacher collaborative techniques do you use with other ESL or general education teachers - both offline and online?

10. How do you use oral instruction to complement reading instruction?

Rarely will you walk into a teacher’s lounge and see teachers working alone. At one of the local high schools where I sub, teachers work semi-isolatedly but not enough to legitimize the theme of this poem, which I copied today from one of the classrooms where I subbed.

Creating supporting working environments determines the outcomes of many different types of relationships. New teachers already understand that working together doesn’t lead to more competitiveness and burn-out. Students, when taught the principles of cooperative learning, deepen their sense of tolerance and understanding. We all need to strive towards helping others become their best.

THOUGHTS FOR WORKING TOGETHER

I dreamed I stood in a studio

And watched two sculptors there.

The clay they used was a young child’s mind

And they fashioned it with care.

One was a teacher - the tools s/he used,

Were books and music and art.

One a parent with a guiding hand,

And a gentle, loving heart.

Day after day the teacher toiled,

With a touch that was deft and sure.

While the parent labored by his(her) side,

And polished and smoothed it o’er.

And when at last their task was done,

They were proud of what they had wrought.

For the things they had molded into the child,

Could neither be sold nor bought.

And both agreed they would have failed,

If each had worked alone.

For behind the parent stood the school,

And behind the teacher, the home.

Most general education teachers of ELLs (English language learners) will tell you they are usually doing one of two things to support their readers. They are either figuring out the best way to teach them within a full class inclusion or what kind of activities can suit their abilities within a full class framework. That’s the only way to ensure the steps of engage them in a full class where it is often very easy to loose them.

One way to make it easier to support struggling ELLs is to develop a weekly plan. A good time to develop this plan for the week is after you pre-assessed your students’ reading abilities. You can do this using either an oral or written assessment based on the areas you want to teach. Your support plan will provide a blueprint or “road map” of the weaker areas that are difficult for your ELLs to acquire. Your weekly support plan should consist of a list of the following:

1. Areas or skills you want to concentrate on - This may include areas that correspond to the educational standards that the textbook focuses on or any supplementary material to the textbook.

2. Core or supplementary reading activities - These are activities that you may choose to adapt from the textbook in order to cater to their level. You might however use some of the textbook activities or from a website that provides information and guidelines on differentiated instruction. Core activities simply means using identifying those activities that correspond to a particular benchmark or educational standard.

3. Opportunities for Assessment - Struggling learners needs periodic follow-ups and assessment opportunities. Try using mini-assessments, which don’t focus on too much information at one time, but rather small(er) chunks of information like a grammar point or the vocabulary that you taught in a reading lesson.

4. Small group lesson planning - This category is a bit different from the traditional lesson planning for full group instruction. Working in small group can be a good intervention tool if you know the areas of weaknesses. You might join other teachers and map out targeted areas of the curriculum if you are also teaching the similar levels and grades. Have a plan for introducing the main input to the rest of the class before you direct students to learn in small groups.

You can make your weekly lesson plan for your struggling readers as general or as detailed as you like. Not every activity works for every student, but once you have taught using your lesson plan for the week, you will know which areas take more planning and preparation time. Generally, more experienced classroom teachers change their weekly lesson plans as they acquire more information about their struggling readers. You might need to observe more before you make on the spot classroom decisions.

The most reassuring thing I did as a teacher was to reflect on my lesson plans and my teacher development by writing in my journal. I enjoyed writing about successful teaching moments with students, other teachers and parents. 

Even on difficult days when I lost focus, I spent time journaling my thoughts and tried to focus on those successful incidents even if they were small. I needed those “reminders” to keep myself focused.

Often family and friends feel the difference when you’re out of focus. And sometimes I do take a break from trying to focus too much and enjoy the time with family and friends. But, the main way to stay focused as a teacher is to constantly make sure that you are connected with your mission and purpose in teaching them.

And that momentum means creating a time of day where you can catch up on yourself, see where “you are” beyond the “teacher’s hat”. Choose a specific time and place that will help you gather your bearings.

If you’re having trouble staying focused on moving your teaching career ahead, chances are, your specific circumstances and classroom incidents are getting you off track.

But you shouldn’t blame your students for doing it.

They can’t MAKE you get away from your focus. Only YOU can make the decision to do that.

So decide to regroup your energies. Celebrate your successes! Write a little bit in your journal. Give yourself permission to do something that will give you joy and pleasure and stick to it. It’s been working for me. I know it will work for you.

Go for it!

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Holiday Giveaway Special: Please share your thoughts on any special techniques and strategies you use to refocus as a teacher. What particularly works for you? Click on the title 3 Minute Motivators by Kathy Paterson to learn about more than 100 simple ways to reach, teach and achieve your teaching goals. One lucky random winner will receive this book. What a great way to start out 2009! Don’t forget to leave your email address!