SOL day 10
I ordered Teach like a Champion by Doug Lemov a while back, and received it in the mail yesterday. I started reading it over, and there are so many important techniques to keep in mind in order to be a successful teacher – the overall topics I have heard of before like setting high expectations, building trust, having clear behavioral expectations but some of the individual techniques within each are new and it is interesting to read! I just started flipping through Chapter one about the techniques behind having high expectations, and I’m looking forward to opening my eyes to new ideas and tucking them away for when I teach. I plan to try some out next term with full-time teaching, but some will be difficult since it hasn’t been my class for the whole year. I was forced to stop looking at my professional development books for a few weeks due to the intense load of school and needing to relax in a different way. I plan to bring some of these with me when I go home for Spring Break, so I can slowly read through them all and take notes. I have post-its, tabs, and highlighter in many of the pages and the system is color-coded across all the books 😮 I want it to be obvious to me which note is on a page that I am turning to. 
Teaching is all about having a certain mindset and loving what you do. I like the fact that I became interested in professional development books because it is helping see more resources for teaching and a range of ideas. It is beneficial for me to understand how other teachers succeed, so I can know how to test out my own strategies and what to do when they don’t all work effectively. This graduate program has been great because we will be teachers after one year, but it is also too fast in the sense that we haven’t practiced teaching very much – the first term of observing could have been almost part-time (a few weeks less than half the term). Many already graduated peers have said that Spring term really prepares you for teaching, and being organized over the summer, so we’ll see if I agree when that time comes! 
newTeachrtips 
I cannot begin to tell you how true this is from the student point of view. I know I never would have remained the voracious reader that I am had it not been for the string of teachers throughout grade and high school who constantly praised and challenged me – to read more than what was on the curriculum, to comprehend each story and try to find the connection to my world, to use my imagination and my own words to create. While I am sure the professional development books help immensely, the person him/herself has to have that driving force to want to have that connection with their charges in the first place. Those are the teachers who instruct, who have the students who just do not observe, but absorb.
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Spring term, I think, just makes June seem all the closer. Enjoy it!
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I loved this line “Teaching is all about having a certain mindset and loving what you do.” It is so important to LOVE teaching! There is nothing like it! Enjoy every minute.
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I didn’t truly learn to be a teacher until my first year of full time teaching. I got my BS in elementary ed and then worked as an instructional aide for a year and a half before landing that first full time gig. I learned so much from my various field experiences and student teaching and even more working in various classrooms as an aide, but holy cow, that learning curve is steep once you are the one in charge. Good luck! It’s the hardest job you’ll ever have, but also the most rewarding, at least in my experience.
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