How First Year Teachers Find Their Rhythm In The Classroom

Second grade teacher Sara Draper teaches her students at Helmsburg Elementary a math lesson. This is Draper’s first year in the classroom. (photo credit: Alexander McCall/WFIU News)

This story is part of The First Year series, which follows three new teachers as they navigate the ups and downs of the first year in the classroom. See the full series and listen to and read more content here.

When you’re new to something, it takes a lot of trial and error to figure out a rhythm. For first-time teachers, this process happens with dozens of students acting as their guinea pigs.

The three first-year teachers spent years in their undergraduate classes learning teaching tactics and classroom management skills and practicing them during their time as student teachers. But now that they have a class of their own with no other teachers to help, they have to figure out what works and what doesn’t for their students.

“You have to really find what fits your kids’ needs”

Gabe Hoffman’s third grade class at Nora Elementary has a math test coming up, so he’s leading them in a review game. He writes an addition or subtraction problem on the board and they solve it on their own. If a student gets it wrong, he or she is out. But right now, the group is talking too much when they should be working.

“I’m going to sit here, you have 30 seconds to get it together or we are not playing,” Hoffman calls out over the noise.

He’s frustrated because he wants to play games with his students and make the test review fun. But six weeks into the school year, he’s getting a handle on what types of games work – and don’t work – with his kids.

• How The First-Year Teachers Are Finding Their Rhythm In The ClassroomContinuing her series following three first year teachers, Claire McInerny looks at how the teachers are figuring out which teaching tactics do and don’t work with their kids.Download

“It just depends, you have to really find what fits your kids’ needs,” he says.

For Hoffman, he’s learned his students can’t focus when they play games in teams, and he has to give them more structure when doing group work.

“I know other teachers can do whatever they want and their kids are fine getting right back together,” Hoffman says. “But I have a group where I have a couple in the room that are particularly able to amp up everybody else, so it just depends on who’s in the room at what time.”

Which has caused some growing pains for Hoffman. Today’s review game is a good example. Since the kids came back from recess they’ve had trouble calming down and focusing on their work. He tried playing a two-minute educational video to calm them down. He read aloud from a novel they’re reading as a class and had them work in small groups using class computers. But they keep getting rowdy. So Hoffman starts walking around the room collecting the white boards they were using to show their answers and hands them a worksheet to complete silently instead.

Stocking A Teacher’s Toolbox

Heidi Torres teaches undergraduate curriculum classes at Indiana University. She says helping future teachers prepare for any situation is more important than arming them with individual teaching strategies.

“Recognizing that a strategy that I give you may not work in this classroom, but it will work in this one,” is key, she says. “Having what we like to call a ‘toolbox,’ because not everything works everywhere in the same way.”

One of the tactics Sara Draper has added to her toolbox is tailoring her behavior system to her students’ needs. Every classroom at Helmsburg Elementary in Brown County uses a clip chart, where a student moves their clip up for good behavior and down for bad.

Throughout the day, Draper will call out to students to go ‘clip up’ when they properly put materials away or sit quietly. But almost immediately this school year, she noticed some of the kids were uncomfortable when she called them out –even for good behavior.

“When I was walking around and I noticed someone instead of saying ‘wow, you can go clip up you’re doing such an awesome job reading,’ I would say in a whisper, ‘you can clip up,’ and they would walk over there and move their clip, but they’re not singled out in front of the class,” Draper says.

Draper says this makes the students feel more comfortable in the classroom.

Making sure her system is consistent and solid is crucial at this point in the year because both Draper and the kids are still getting to know one another.

“I feel like these kids are testing me,” Draper says. “The first three weeks of school? Easy, everything was fine. Then they started to test my following through, I guess. But I think we’re getting back to them realizing I’m serious.”

Strategies To Build The Teacher’s Confidence

As much as these new teachers want the kids to feel comfortable, they themselves are trying all these different approaches to teaching so they can feel confident too, in their new role as educators.

And some days it’s frustrating. Chris Conway, a fifth grade math and science teacher at Riverside Intermediate School in Fishers, recalls one day when none of his kids grasped a lesson on fractions.

“The way I taught it, they did not get it the way I wanted them to,” Conway says. “So I went home and thought of another way to do it. I came back the next day with another way to do it and I just saw light bulbs going off all over the classroom.”

And that’s what it’s all about – Conway found a way to connect with his students so they understood the lesson.  And at the end of the day, Conway says he left school feeling like he’d done a good job.