CNN's Schools of Thought Blog has a great post for new teachers byRebecca Mieliwocki (@MrsMieliwocki on Twitter),a seventh grade English teacher in California who was chosen the 2012 National Teacher of the Year.
I encourage you to check out the entire post, titled Advice to a New Teacher. Here area couple of my favorite points from the nine that she makes in the post:
"It’s all about the pencil. It took me far too long to realize this, so I’m telling it to you up front. New teachers often get trapped in a struggle with kids over supplies: where they are, why they didn’t bring them to class, losing them, borrowing them. It’s exhausting and it often keeps you from doing what you need to be doing. In our zeal to teach readiness and responsibility we mistakenly make having supplies a hill we choose to fight for and die on. Stubborn teachers do and kids suffer...I won’t let anything get between my kids’ learning and what I have to teach them each day. You shouldn’t either. I have incorporated that theory into every decision I make and you should, too."
"Have courage to teach boldy, with creativity, and beyond the test. Kids must learn, you must grab kids where they are and move them. They’ll come to you with a whole host of issues, whether they’re at grade level or not. Your job is to find out where they are, find out what they need and then give it to them. Move them. Any forward academic movement is a good thing. These are the results people are dying to see if we can achieve."
I still remember the feelings I had as a new teacher - the anticipation keeping me awake the night before the first day of classes, the butterflies in the stomach, the concern that I wasn't going to be accepted by my new colleagues, etc. In addition, I remember struggling to find resources that would be useful for me in my classroom.
Fortunately new teachers today have a wealth of resources for lesson plan support, classroom management issues, home/school communication, and anything else they need. The problem now however is that there are so many useful resources on-line that it is difficult to know exactly where to go for support that is both timely and high quality. In order to help out with this, I thought I'd offer a three of my favorite resources for new teachers (and experienced teachers).
As we move into our second year as a Google Apps school, we continue to offer a number of professional development sessions to help teachers make the move away from Microsoft Office and saving documents on our network. These two options will no longer be supported as we move into the 2012-2013 school year.
One of the keys to success for educators is ensuring a high level of communication between staff and students (and parents). If you are looking for a new tool to help you in this task, check out Remind 101. It is a great resource which teachers can use to send group text messages to students and it allows you to set up individual distribution lists for different classes. Best of all, there is no exchange of phone numbers between teachers and students/parents. As a teacher you set up the Remind 101 account and parents can decide whether or not they want to opt in.
The video below created by my friend George Couros contains step-by-step directions on how to set up your Remind 101 account. You can do it in under four minutes!
I had the privilege of introducing Twitter to a group of educators during one of our sessions at our opening PD Conference (#BPSCON). As I started the session, I asked my (PLN) Personal Learning Network for some advice to show the power of this great resource. You can see what happened below:
We had over 15 responses in less than 30 minutes. Not to mention the fact that these responses came from educators all over the map with responses coming from Arizona, Georgia, California, Wisconsin, Kansas, Florida, Utah, Louisiana, Australia, United Kingdom, Alabama, Illinois, and Washington, D.C. What a clear example of what a wonderful resource Twitter is to connect with educators all over the world!
I was going to share my presentation here as well, but a final tweet from Blackboard linked to the publication below which contains everything you need to get started with Twitter!
As we approach the opening day of school, one of the things that is high on the priority list for teachers is thinking of ways to get to know their new students. Thanks to Tom Barrett's Interesting Ways Series, I am able to share 36 possibilities to connect with new students in the slides below.
The Interesting Ways Series is a crowd-sourced list of best practices from teachers all over the world. Check out the link above for a number of other great resources on other topics.
Thanks again to all of the new teachers who took part in today's new teacher orientation. We are so excited that you chose BPS and we look forward to supporting you as you work with our students. We hope that you will find that Burlington is a place where you can feel comfortable continuing to take risks and grow as a learner. Because if our teachers do not feel this way, we will also rob our students of the opportunity to reach their full potential.
Get Connected
We encourage you to take advantage of the resources you have available to connect and collaborate with educators both within and outside of our school district. The United States Department of Education as designated August as Connected Educator Month and there are a number of great resources available at the Connected Educator website.
There are a few ways you can get started. The easiest way is to start following this blog. Please enter your e-mail address in the box on the righthand side of the blog. This will ensure that you get a daily e-mail with any new blog posts from the BPS New Teacher Blog. that you can get started. You can also use your google account to start following blogs through Google Reader which you can access under the more tab at the top of the page when you log into your Google account. We'll talk more about this soon!
Finally, I encourage you to join Twitter and start connecting and sharing with other educators all over the world. Here is a link to a document to help you get started that was originally created by George Couros (a friend who is an administrator in Alberta, Canada). Please be sure to pay special attention to the following hashtags #bpschat (Burlington Public Schools Chat), #ntchat (new teacher chat), and #1st5days (a conversation for getting your year off to a great start).
As I mentioned I will also lead a session on getting started with Twitter during next week's opening Professional Development Conference. You can access the entire conference schedule at the conference website.
Employee Benefits
Here is the employee benefits presentation that was reviewed by our Human Resources Director Joanne Faust. If you have follow-up questions you can e-mail Joanne at faust@bpsk12.org and her extension is 1774.
Teachers' Union
Thanks to BEA President Diana Marcus for taking the time to meet with new teachers this morning. You can contact Diana via her school e-mail marcus@bpsk12.org.
Below is a copy of the Teacher Orientation Handbook
Finally, please check below for our list of dates for module training for our new teachers who have not completed an induction program in another MA district.
Please don't hesitate to contact me at extension 1804 or my secretary Rosemary DeSousa at extension 1989. You can also contact me on Twitter @PatrickMLarkin or call me on my Google Voice number at (559) 245-2757.
