It’s that time of year again! As the leaves change from green to amber, you’re going to find yourself beginning to get back into the swing of things, preparing for the new school year. Teachers everywhere know that planning is an essential part of being successful in the school year. Once summer ends and school time comes around the corner, teachers everywhere look to find the best ways to prepare for a fun, new school year. Below are some of the ways that you can prepare to have a successful school year as a teacher!
Reflect on the last school year
Something that’ll be essential to your success is your ability to look back on last year’s teachings. Look through your lesson plans and teaching strategies and identify the important parts: what worked, what could use some improvement, and what didn’t work at all. The time before the start of the school year is an important time to cherry-pick what you did and didn’t like about the techniques that you used last year, allowing you to rework them for the new year.
Create lesson plans
You’re probably not going to be delving into the nitty gritty depths of the subject you’re teaching on the first day of school. Creating an easy-going lesson plan for the first week of school allows you to take a load of stress off of your shoulders, allowing you to focus on quelling the anxiety that your students may be having. Maybe include some icebreakers after a day of going over the syllabus, easing your students back into the learning environment without inundating them with information.
Look at your classroom policies
Something that you may want to consider is revising your classroom policies. This goes back to reflecting on the last school year, but you may want to consider adding rules into your syllabus. Were cell phones a problem last year? Should you give leniency to late or missing assignments? The classroom policies and rules are how you hold order in your classroom while empowering your students to hold themselves accountable.
You may find that rules you thought were good turned out not to work the way you thought they should. Nailing down a set of rules and subsequent disciplinary actions to follow will help you enforce them throughout the school year.