What First-Year Teachers Wish They'd Known

How to get through your first year, from teachers who have

Overview: Pick a small number of principles and hold them. Build routines for yourself before you build them for students. Ask for help early and specifically, because most colleagues want to help and cannot read your mind. Find one mentor. Year two is dramatically easier, and that is not a platitude.

Most advice given to new teachers falls into one of two categories: too vague to act on ("build relationships") or too time-consuming to be practical ("write a note about each student every day"). This advice either feels hollow or like a Herculean task. The advice that actually holds up comes from teachers who lived through the specific chaos of year one and are willing to describe it plainly. Here's what they'd tell you, in language you can use tomorrow morning.

Teaching is hard.

What does this data mean? It means that many, many people find this profession difficult. Struggle is normal. You're not alone. The question is, what can you do about it?

Well, you're here looking for answers, and that's a big part of it. What most teachers find helpful are principles that can be applied regularly, routines so they and their students find a rhythm, and a mentor who can help answer questions.

Principles that hold up every day

The teachers who make it through year one aren't the ones with the cleverest lesson plans. They're the ones working from a small set of principles they don't abandon on a hard day. Be consistent even when you're exhausted. A rule you only enforce when you have the energy for it functions more like a mood than a rule, and students pick up on the difference fast. Treat a bad day as information about what a student needs, not a verdict on their character, the kid testing you in October is often the same kid thanking you in May. And hold a boundary without losing the relationship, the two aren't in conflict. Enforcing a consequence is one of the ways a student learns you're paying attention. The Faculty Lounge's guide to classroom management strategies that actually work covers the version of this that holds up in a real classroom, not the version from a textbook.

Routines for you

Your own routines matter as much as your students'. Decide in September how you'll handle grading, when you'll answer emails, and when you'll actually stop working for the day, before exhaustion makes those decisions for you. The Faculty Lounge's guide to managing stress and boundaries exists because this is where new teachers lose the most ground: not in the classroom, but in the hours around it.

Routines for your students

Students need the same kind of structure you're building for yourself. A classroom where students know exactly what to do when they walk in, when they finish early, and when it's time to switch activities runs on far less of your energy than one where you're narrating every transition from scratch. The Faculty Lounge's guide to building routines and transitions walks through how to design and teach these from day one.

Finding a mentor

None of the above replaces having a real person to ask. A mentor who has taught what you teach can tell you in five minutes what would otherwise take a month to figure out alone, and can tell you which problems are normal and which ones need real attention. The Faculty Lounge's mentor matching connects you with one, and our piece on finding a teaching mentor covers what to actually look for.

Year two is dramatically different from year one

Nearly every teacher who makes it through year one says some version of the same thing: "year two feels so much easier because I know the path." You've seen a full calendar once, so you have materials to reuse instead of building everything from nothing, and you know what October feels like in your body. The hardest year of teaching is almost always the first one, and it does not stay this hard.

And if you want to connect with people who remember what it felt like, and came out the other side, the Faculty Lounge Forums are a good place to find them.