It's not easy being green.

Being a first year or lateral entry teacher is hard work. Everyday of those 180 days is your first day of doing something, and while it can be exciting, it can also be nerve wracking, depressing, frustrating, and tiring. That’s okay though, because it pays off when your students drop by just to say “hey,” they grasp a hard to understand concept, or you can actually see how far they have progressed since the first day.

The key to helping students succeed, and to making you feel like pedagogy royalty, is to focus on content literacy. As teachers, we all think we’re super smart, well organized, and man, our voice sounds good so good we could even be on an internet podcast, but what we as teachers really need to do is shut up. You’re going to do your job better, if you let your students do the talking. Face it, there are days where 90 minutes aren’t enough and other days where 90 minutes equals infinity, but turning precious class time over to small group discussion saves you time in instruction and planning. As it turns out students learn better from each other than they do from a 22 year old fart.

Yes, they’re going to talk and get a little off task, but so would you if you were in a group. It’s our job to move about the room, facilitate, keep them on track, compliment them, and ask them to probe further. One of the things I did a lot of was whole class discussions, and some days we had some really good talks, but they were really good talks with 5 students, not 22. The small group allows those other 17 kids to have their voices heard, when otherwise their brilliance may have remained bottled up in unvibrating vocal chords.

The small group discussion allows the students to begin thinking like a scientist, mathematician or literary critic, as opposed to the receiver of a bunch of notes they will lose or not look at later. The way I learned my job as a teacher or at Best Buy was to do the actual job and ask questions in the process. It was always easier for me to ask questions of a peer than it was to ask a boss, and student’s function in the same way. Let them loose! Let them practice! Let them ask questions!