Advice For New Teachers

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  1. What was the best piece of advice a veteran teacher gave you and why?
  2. If you could tell your first-year-teaching self one thing, what would it be and why?
  3. Tell a story about a lesson you learned in your first year of teaching that has impacted you throughout your career.
  4. Put together a list of resources you think every new teacher needs.

 

1 – “You must link personal creativity with the common real world: both will become richer.” This advice opened me a royal path to engage with perseverance in long term group activities without losing my inner compass and to give my best to deal with life school challenges.

2 – Be free, follow your intuition: Listen to the kids, ask them to write down their most beautiful questions, collect them, and bring them all together to each one of them as a bunch of flowers to engage deep conversations and make them taste the power of writing.

The reason I would tell such things is because I’ve been given similar advices and they have perfectly fit with my way of dwelling in class. My young students, 32 years ago, were challenging and inspiring at the same time. Listening to their own questions and unleashing their hidden freedom to express their inner world in written words was a deep joy.

3 – As I was standing in the corridor trying to reach the right classroom, a little 5th grader suddenly came to me, took me by her hand all along the corridor with a charming smile until my destiny. She showed me my way quietly, with an exquisite delicacy, as if I was a rare piece of crystal and could easily break.

Such gentleness touched me deeply and it lives in my memory as a metaphor of what is mysteriously at stake in the privilege of communicating so closely with children.

4 – Even if a new teacher comes to a school that isn’t totally innovating yet, and where there is plenty of “talk and chalk” lessons, I thing he needs, at least, to be sure of this two resources: the warm support and sharing with his colleagues in the school community and the freedom to create new approaches of his duties, mainly inspired in his own students’ higher expectations.  

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