Graduating with a teaching degree is a major achievement—but what happens when a job offer doesn’t come right away? For some new teachers, the transition from student to full-time teacher may not be immediate. And while we are experiencing a nationwide teacher shortage, the competition can still be tough. Open positions may be limited depending on location, subject area, or budget constraints. But this is the time to learn new skills and improve your teaching practice, making you a stronger candidate for your ideal placement.
Improve Your Technology Skills
With the proliferation of online/hybrid/hyflex teaching modes, varieties of Learning Management Systems (LMS), as well as the use of AI in education, now is the time to hone your skills. Select one area that you want to master. For example, with an LMS (like Canvas or Blackboard) consider what your desired school district(s) are using and familiarize yourself with them. While each has similar core functions, they differ just enough to have to learn new features.
AI is another area that you need to familiarize yourself with. There is an AI tool to help with every area of teaching. In “7 AI tools that can help teachers work more efficiently,” Poth (2023) highlights tools that help teachers from notetaking and brainstorming to lesson plan development and assessment. As you work on your AI dexterity, be sure to reflect on the ethics of AI use and how your expertise as an educator is used to control the AI tool you implement.
Develop Your Teaching Practice
The diversity and ever-changing needs of students, as well as your connection with them, are important. Therefore, it is imperative that you have a background in culturally responsive teaching and social-emotional learning (SEL). Your culturally responsive teaching practice and relational agility can be the hallmark of who you are and what you bring to a teaching team.
On the surface, SEL and culturally responsive teaching appear to be isolated areas, but they are complementary to each other and share many of the same techniques and strategies. “SEL is the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions” (CASEL, n.d.). Culturally responsive teaching is “the process of using familiar cultural information and processes to scaffold learning (Hammond 2014, 156).” Critical to this process is communal relationships (Hammond 2014). The skills needed for SEL are also necessary to establish a culturally responsive teaching practice.
In “Teaching with a Social, Emotional and Cultural Lens: A Framework for Educators and Teacher Educators,” Markowitz and Bouffard (2020) integrate SEL and culturally responsive teaching to better meet the needs of all learners. In their text, they identify seven anchors for their approach (2020, 35). Ask yourself which of the following anchors you want to learn more about and want to develop to a greater extent. Consider what activities, techniques and strategies you can use that will strengthen that anchor in your teaching practice. Use the questions for each of the anchors to get you started.
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Build trusting relationships: What activities or questions can you use that will build a relationship between you and students, to forge stronger teacher-learner relationships? How do students learn in their community, and how can you bring this process back to the classroom?
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Foster self-reflection: What questions can you ask, or what reflection rituals can you implement that will get students thinking about what is helping or hindering their learning? What questions can you ask yourself about what is helping or hindering your own growth as a teacher?
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Foster growth mindset: What can you do to remind students that learning and growing requires challenge? What activities can you create that help students identify their own heroes (from their own culture, community, or from their own interests) and what the heroes overcame to achieve?
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Cultivate perseverance: What feedback can you give a learner that will encourage them to persevere? What are the cultural norms for how feedback is given to the student? Is there a project or challenge that individual students, or the class as a whole, can do together to model perseverance?
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Create community: What can you do to create a learning community where all students belong? Are there activities, events, or ways to consistently recognize cultures represented, so everyone is seen, known, and belongs?
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Promote collaborative learning: What can you do to promote collaborative learning, where students not only learn from the teacher, but from each other? Are there cultural norms to learning and how learning happens (e.g., through memorization, hands-on application)? What cultural background information do you need to know to create effective learning teams?
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Respond constructively across differences: What language and strategies do students need to be able to talk through conflict? Is there anything you need to know about the larger community that will give insight into how conflict is mediated? What are you doing to uncover your own implicit biases to mediate conflict and foster meaningful conversations with students?
The above anchors help to build a teaching practice based on culturally responsive teaching and SEL.
A Final Thought
Apply for an emergency teaching certificate or a substitute teaching position to gain valuable experience. Welcome the adventure of new classrooms, especially those in Title I schools, and in schools with large populations of multilingual learners. The changes in classroom, schools, and communities can broaden your perspective of who learners are, who you are, and how you meet learning needs. All experiences working in a school are good experiences.
Take control of this time and grow your knowledge and experience, making you ready for your next teaching position.
Markowitz, Nancy Lourié and Bouffard, Suzanne N. 2020. Teaching with a Social, Emotional, and Cultural Lens: A Framework for Educators and Teacher Educators. Harvard Education Press.
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Suzan Kobashigawa is a teacher educator working with pre-service teachers in higher education. She teaches courses in intercultural communication and culturally responsive teaching, along with TESOL courses. Suzan has been in the field of English language teaching for over 30 years, and has taught in Japan, Mexico and the United States. She continues to deliver teacher training internationally, most recently in Indonesia. Suzan holds a Ph.D. in Composition and TESOL, and an MA in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. Outside of the classroom Suzan enjoys traveling and cooking. While born and raised in Hawai‘i, Suzan makes her home in Seattle, Washington. |
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John Hiski Ridge is a full-time tax attorney and professional writer. He is also a former associate professor of philosophy and law. John is a graduate of Boston College, where he earned both his J.D. and a Ph.D. in philosophy. He has published articles on many topics, including disability awareness, leadership, legal writing, and mountain climbing. He is also the author of Maggie and Me, a blog that teaches philosophy and science to young adults—johnhiskiridge.com |