Three Things College Won’t Teach You About Teaching

And why you should learn these things before the first week of school

Ask any teacher today what advice they have for prospective teachers, and the answer is the same: their first year of teaching will always be the worst. What if it didn’t have to be that way?

Teachers should have a better experience during their first year of teaching. Unfortunately, first-year teachers enter the classroom critically underprepared.

The teacher is not to blame, rather the educational program they attended. University professors do not teach future teachers on how to be effective. There are three significant areas that professors need to address before these future teachers can become effective.

How to teach students with special needs

First-year teachers will spend most of their planning period tailoring their lesson plan to fit the needs of their students. Some students have a reading disability, like dyslexia.

Other students have an anxiety disorder, which might keep them from participating in group settings. Some kids read slower than others or can’t read at all.

Some students require directions to be given to them one step at a time or else they might feel like it’s too much information and can’t consume it all. Some cannot sit down for extended periods and require standing up frequently to move around the room. Worst of all, some students go undiagnosed until high school.

Regardless of the need, college courses won’t teach them how to identify and address these needs. They might let them know these conditions exist, but they ask them to figure it out.

Unfortunately, there are too many needs to address to expect a teacher-to-be to figure out how to address these issues in one semester. It is unrealistic.

The college professor might ask college students to research one special need and present it in front of the class, but that doesn’t provide enough context. Instead, professors should introduce their students to the IEP and 504 plans.

Unfortunately, professors focus so much time on the theory of teaching and little on application. Most college students are never introduced to an actual copy of an IEP or 504 plans.

It’s likely they won’t see one until they’re called into an ARD to meet with the parent and student on how to help meet the needs of the student.

By introducing students to this and having students search for solutions to frequent needs that need to be met, students will get a better idea of how to address these needs once they begin their teaching career.

This ought to be considered a major issue in education classes. For one, first-year teachers struggle to comprehend not only how to identify students with special needs, but also how to differentiate their classroom settings to allow them to prosper.

Veteran teachers have become used to the idea of letting students “fall through the cracks”, as they often say, because of a failure to address these issues.

They never learned how to properly help students with special needs, despite it being required by law, which results in the failure of the education system in this regard.

If university educational programs better prepared teachers-to-be on how to help students with special needs, those cracks would be sealed, and teachers could provide a more equitable classroom setting for all students.

How to lesson plan

Before a first-year teacher can address the needs of their students, they must learn how to plan their lessons. There are various types of lesson plan models, like the “5E” method, the reverse lesson plan, and the “I do, we do, you do” method, to name a few. Regardless of which one is used, college students need to learn how to lesson plan daily.

It is unrealistic to assign students to create a lesson plan for a certain topic and be given several weeks to complete it. While it can be conceded that college students might work and have other responsibilities, welcome to the real world! Teachers are required to create lesson plans daily, or every other day if their teaching schedule functions under the block schedule.

Exposing college students to real-world applications would benefit those who want to teach immensely and weed those out who would quit teaching after a year, maybe less.

However, before exposing teachers-to-be to this type of stress, education professors ought to notify their students not to reinvent the wheel. One of the biggest and most frequent mistakes of first-year teachers is trying to reinvent the wheel.

First-year teachers rarely have any experience in the classroom. Why do they believe they can create a lesson plan every day and meet the needs of every student?

Ask any veteran teacher, and they will all say the same thing: the first year of teaching is always the worst. First-year teachers will stress over trying to apply the newest teaching method to their classrooms and fret when it doesn’t work.

Instead of teaching college students to go out and change the world, professors must teach their students that there are lesson plans and curriculum available everywhere.

There is free and paid curriculum available online that will save you hundreds of hours over the course of the school year.

For example, if one looks for world history curriculum online, one will find a semester’s worth of lesson plans available for $300. Assuming a teacher is paid $25 per hour, that’s twelve hours of a teacher’s time.

There is no possible way to create a semester’s worth of lesson plans in twelve hours.

A first-year teacher would save so much time if they didn’t attempt to reinvent the wheel and instead spent time searching for resources available online. If college professors taught this, teachers could spend more time tweaking lesson plans to tailor to the needs of their students instead of creating them from scratch.

Classroom management

This is the most common reason first-year teachers quit and don’t return to teaching the following year. Teachers who cannot solve the first two issues above cannot maintain classroom management.

Students can sense when a teacher doesn’t know what they’re doing. This leads to students becoming disengaged. Once a student becomes disengaged, they see no need to remain in the classroom, so they might ask to go to the restroom or the nurse and skip the rest of the class.

Teachers who know how to maintain good classroom management see a high attendance rate and a high rate of completion of the work assigned, even among truant students.

One of the biggest motivators for students to show up to class and complete the work is classroom management. When students find the teacher is consistent with their rules, they tend to respect them more.

However, students will question the teacher’s authenticity if the teacher does not maintain consistency, which will lead to poor classroom management.

For example, if a teacher tells their students at the beginning of the school year they are not allowed to go to the restroom the first and last fifteen minutes of class, but the next day allows a student to go five minutes after the tardy bell rings, the students have already sensed poor classroom management.

If on the third day, the teacher upholds the rule with a different student, students will assume a bias and not only feel disrespected by the teacher but will also question how consistent the teacher will be.

Students will begin testing the waters and see what they can get away with. As the teacher fails to be consistent, the result will be poor classroom management.

Education professors have a responsibility to teach consistency to college students. By teaching them consistency, the future teachers will know how to properly manage their classroom. Unfortunately, not enough time is spent showing real-world scenarios and discussing in the classroom how they might solve these issues.

For example, a first-year teacher does not know how to address a student who frequently interrupts. Another example would be a student who makes inappropriate comments about the opposite gender.

In another scenario, a first-year teacher does not know how to address or even identify students who are under the influence of drugs in the classroom.

If first-year teachers were presented with these scenarios in their college education courses, not only would they come in better prepared, but they could maintain proper classroom management, and handle teaching in school districts where effective teachers are needed.

Imagine a scenario where a professor tells the teachers-to-be that placing images and videos in their PowerPoints is important for students. By doing so, they won’t feel overwhelmed by the text on the slides, and it will help any ESL or special needs students understand what they are learning by using those visual aids as context.

In this scenario, while the professor is discussing this, the professor fails to include any sort of visual aids in their own lecture.

Not only is this hypocritical, but it also lacks consistency. These prospective teachers fail to grasp the actual value of using visual cues since the professor themselves is not using it.

When education professors are consistent, they engrave their values onto these future teachers, which in turn creates consistent teachers.

Conclusion:

Teaching is a struggle. Like any other job, it has its risks and rewards. Teachers need to be better prepared for the real world, but they cannot do this alone.

If university professors can better address and teach these issues, teachers who enter the workforce can be better prepared and no longer will the phrase “your first year of teaching will be the worst” be uttered.

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