Let’s be honest, teachers have some of the most important and most difficult jobs in the world, especially during the back to school season. If you’re a new teacher, or an experienced teacher who’s just looking to jazz up your teaching routine and improve your workflow, today we will be sharing five different ways to make your back to school season a little bit easier.
Create Detailed Lesson Plans
Full disclosure: I am not a teacher myself, but I do know how difficult it is going into something unprepared. Making sure that you have your lesson plans detailed and prepared as ahead of time as you possibly can is going to make your work week go by so much smoother. Teachers Pay Teachers is a great website to check out the has a ton of free and paid resources created by other teachers to help you get your lesson plans moving along.
Making sure to do your research well in advance so that you’re not spending your first few weeks or a few months of back to school season scrambling to come up with lessons is definitely recommended. Not only will your students appreciate it, but your sleep schedule and your personal life will appreciate it, as well. Lots of crazy things can come up during back to school season, so it’s good to be able to react to those things real-time.
Get to Know Your Coworkers
Another thing that’s good for anyone new in a profession or in a workplace is getting to know your coworkers. As a teacher, very few people can relate to you quite as well as a fellow teacher can. It’s great to have that built in support system, and you never know when you might need to discuss something that’s going on in school-wide, with a particular student, or a particular school policy.
Make sure to make yourself available, ask people out to lunch, or even offer to volunteer to plan some type of activity for your school staff.
Do Your Research
This probably goes without saying, but any job gets done easier when you know what to expect — so do your research. As you’re entering your first year of teaching, make sure to observe what other teachers are experiencing and what some trends are in the classroom so that you know what to expect. Luckily, YouTube has a ton of great resources. Teacher vlogs are all the rage right now, and it’s a great way to get a sneak peek of a day in the life of a teacher before you actually get out there and start teaching on your own. Here are a few of our favorites:
We’d also recommend taking a look at both the student and employee handbooks. It’s great to get both perspectives and understand what the expectations are at your school. Every institution has different rules and regulations, so familiarizing yourself with those will help to make sure that there are no surprises for the rest of the year.
Take Stock of Your Wardrobe
On that same note, you might want to take stock of your wardrobe. As a teacher, it’s important to be comfortable since you’re wearing your clothes for at least eight hours each day. Make sure that you have clothes that are comfortable and that allow you to move around, especially if you’re working with younger children. You’ll also want to go back to that employee handbook and make sure that your clothes are school appropriate, since different schools have different dress codes.
If you’re looking to get rid of some of your not-so-school-appropriate clothes and pick up some more comfortable, school appropriate outfits, clothing swaps are a great (and eco-friendly!) way to do that. You can search for clothing swaps on sites like Meetup or Rehashed Clothes.
Do a Thorough Search of Your Name
Lastly, you’ll want to be sure that before you step into the classroom, you’ve done a thorough search of your name. Again, every school has different policies regarding social media in general, so you’ll want to make sure that you’re abiding by that. But even if you are abiding by all the rules, you’ll probably want to make sure that you know what’s going on and what’s being said about you online.
Using a tool like Marple allows you to see exactly what other people will when they search for name. Unfortunately, sometimes teachers can be targets of bullying themselves, and although most of your students will likely be wonderful, sometimes they can look you up online and use some of that information against you. Also, many parents nowadays are searching for their child’s teachers online and making sure that nothing inappropriate or offensive is coming up. Making sure that you know exactly what they’re going to see is going to allow you to better control that information and take control of your reputation.