My First Day as a Teacher

I want to think about my first day at my first school instead of the current one. It was my first day in education as a teacher in Russia 23 years ago. The education medium was in English but the subject book was in Turkish, and besides, the syllabus was Russian. We had 8 computers with Windows 95 and they were located in the student hostel, not in school. The school was not secure to keep computers and later on, one school computer was stolen from the VP office. I did not have proper class, books and guide teachers to give proper classes. They had computers in school but they were Russian computers and just for programming. My first helper and guide were our VP. First, he motivated me and guided me about materials, class routines and school procedures. I struggle a lot to set one routine for my classes. I was taking classes during the evening, at the student hostel, the next day I was going to school for filling registers. I got help for my daily and weekly plans after 3 months from my head of the department and he was located in another city with an 800 km distance. The coldest days of Cyberia, I traveled and got help from an experienced ICT teacher. The majority of my job tasks were confusing me. The syllabus was not updated and targets were not clear. I was asking my experienced teacher friends about tasks and procedures that I need in the classes and in daily routines. I observed classes to improve my experience. I could not ask any questions to Russian teachers because they knew just Russian and I knew English and Turkish. I wished to communicate with them and I started learning Russian. I participated in Russian Language lessons of teachers and I observed their teaching style and usage of language, intonation, jests, and mimics. I was learning one language and at the same time, I was learning how to teach. My initial experiences about teaching are the same as Bambrick-Santoyo's (2016) first two phases.

I wished to start in my own country and guide who had the same language as me. The daily language was the challenge I faced. I could not communicate with parents directly. They did not know English and Turkish unfortunately. I did one daily schedule for me and started with learning language. “If I could not communicate with parents, how can I help on time to students’, I thought. I set my routines weekly and daily. I went to training courses done by teaching school which is closer to us, just next building. I am always thankful to our VP. because he guided me to find solutions and gaining experience in a short time.  

Now time is changed. Even my residing continent is changed. We have experience and using government rules and regulations. Kenya is a part of the Common-Wealth group and the education base is British. Just we need to follow government requirements for training teachers. Also, we have own supervising and mentoring system in our schools. Job descriptions are clear.

Now we have weekly, monthly, termly, and yearly training, workshops, and meetings. To improve new teachers faster, we need to encourage learning communities to share the experience with other teachers, to do leadership trainings with examples, to provide proper universal training recourses, to do staff trainings even non-teachings, to provide proper feed-back about evaluation, to provide research-based activities, to apply strategies to improve learning skills, to improve collaboration, to provide safe environment to all members of school, to increase family involvement and to increase education quality (Zepeta, 2017). 

I want to apply for a training program with planned coaching for new teachers. Setting short term targets and long-term targets and training will be helpful for teachers. The basic requirement is classroom language, lesson planning, and culture. First 2 months we can focus on these pieces of training. Need to take demo lessons and give feedback to teachers for correcting mistakes are essential. Long term goals are can be academic training, classroom management, school & government policies. We need to take surveys about completions of the checklist of targets frequently, monthly for example.  

References

Bambrick-Santoyo, P. (2016). Get Better Faster: A 90-Day Plan for Coaching New Teachers (Kindle Location 3599). Wiley. Kindle Edition.    

Zepeda, S. J. (2017). Instructional supervision: Applying tools and concepts. Routledge. P 97.