Your first year of teaching can be super overwhelming. It’s a lot of hard work and first year teachers can feel like they’re drowning! Hopefully you’re in a school with supportive veteran teachers, but if you haven’t met your co-workers yet, and you’re about to step into your own classroom, I wanted to share some advice to tackle the biggest challenges for new educators. 

This is going to be a hefty post! We’ll look at good days & bad days, how to set boundaries, time management, creating strong relationships and a positive learning environment, setting up your first classroom, what to do on the first day and first week of school, and so much more. Let’s get into things you need to know as you learn and develop your own teaching style!

Tips for First Year Teachers

Tips for New Teachers Part 1: Interview Process

What to Wear to a Teaching Interview

You can’t be a new Spanish teacher without getting a job! First off, you’ll need to decide what you’re going to wear to make a strong first impression. There’s a lot of opinions out there, but my thought is that the most important thing is that you feel like YOU so you’re comfortable and confident! Check out more advice on your teacher interview outfit in my blog post here.

Job Interview Questions for Teachers

Once that’s settled, let’s walk through what that interview process might look like by taking a look at common Spanish Teacher Job Interview Questions, Questions to Ask During an Interview, and Red Flags in an Interview for Teachers to Watch Out For.

Remember, an interview isn’t just about them offering you a job. You want to find a school that is a good fit for your teaching career! You don’t want to learn the hard way that a school district is hiring because all of the veteran educators fled. Yikes!

Demo Lesson Tips for Teaching Interviews

Once you get past the first interview and you feel confident that the school could be a good fit for you, it’s not uncommon to be invited to teach a demo lesson. Here are a few resources to help you with that:

• What to Bring to a Demo Lesson
• 10 Tips for an Amazing Demo Lesson
• Demo Lesson Ideas

Once you ace that interview, we’ll get to the next step of getting ready for a new school year: setting up your classroom!

Tips for New Teachers Part 2: Ready Your Room

It’s easy to spend too much time on decorating your room – especially when it’s your first classroom and you’re super excited. It’s important to note that a great teacher and a good teacher aren’t separated by a beautiful classroom – there’s so many other things to consider!

Spanish Classroom Decor & Posters

Visual Supports and Scaffolding

Let’s talk about best practice for decorating your space as a Spanish teacher with these must have posters. A little goes a long way in making your space bright and supporting student learning and at the beginning of the school year when you have a ton going on, you don’t need to overwhelm yourself with creating a pinterest perfect classroom.

Bulletin Board Ideas for Spanish Class

Of course, if you have the space and the time, you certainly can decorate your classroom! Check out 10 bright and colorful classroom displays here.These are simple options to brighten your room at the start of the year, and many of them include student work (which some admin obsess over). 

Classroom Set Up Tips for First Year Teachers

Seating Charts

We can’t talk about getting your room ready without discussing seating arrangements. Even experienced teachers groan at the thought of creating a new seating chart, and it can be pretty hefty for first-year teachers to tackle! Check out some things to consider when arranging your classroom – even if you haven’t met your students yet, there are things you can decide. Pick between rows, groups, a horseshoe shape – oh my! Learn more in the blog post here. 

Tips for Traveling Teachers with Multiple Classrooms

Finally, we’re talking about preparing your classroom, but what do you do if you don’t have a classroom – or have several classrooms to call home? I’ve been there, too! Check out this blog post on how to handle having multiple classrooms as a world language teacher. It’s not the end of the world, and I actually liked being able to visit my fellow teachers as we shared spaces, but it will likely affect your planning period and can create some unexpected challenges.

Tips for New Teachers Part 3: Prep Your Classroom Policies and Procedures

One of the most important skills first-time teachers need to develop is setting boundaries, clear expectations, and sticking to contract hours. Teaching is something that is so easy to find yourself spending less and less time on personal hobbies and life and more time pouring yourself into your classroom to try to be a better teacher. It’s a worthwhile goal, but doesn’t help you take care of yourself and can lead to burnout early in your teaching career. Not ideal!! Let’s talk about how to set classroom expectations and healthy work habits to get to the root of the problem – before it even starts.

Setting Effective Rules for First Year Teachers

First off, you need to consider your classroom policies. This takes time to find things that work for you and your teaching style, and you’ll likely try something and make tweaks to it year after year. That’s okay! You just want to have something in place so you can lean on them for things like cheating, late work, retakes, and more. Depending on your grade level and school, you might need to set up a cell phone policy, too! Check out this blog post for my thoughts to give you a jumping off point as you’re mulling it over.

Setting the Goal for 90% Time in the Target Language

As a world language teacher, something that’s really awesome about our content area is that we get to spend time just talking with our students and building relationships with them that way – just in the target language. Sometimes students’ parents, guardians, even students themselves can find themselves overwhelmed or surprised by hearing so much Spanish in Spanish class (yea… I know. Even typing that sentence makes me shake my head, but trust me, it’s a thing). 

I have found it incredibly helpful to give them a head’s up at back to school night or open house to help them adjust to the idea that yes, we will be speaking Spanish IN SPANISH CLASS. *sigh* One way to do that is to just have this handout available. It’s a free download in my blog post here, and it just lays out why spending 90% of class time in the target language is the goal, where that number came from, and how students and the teacher will work together to make it happen.  

Classroom Management Tips for First Year Teachers

Next up on things to consider is classroom management. It might feel strange to consider classroom management when you haven’t even met your class yet, but it’s really good to think about how you’ll respond to scenarios before you’re in the thick of things and need to handle a situation. Check out my blog post on classroom management here, and then dig into these tips for handling disruptive and disrespectful behaviors here.

After you’ve thought about those policies and procedures, you’re going to want to put them in writing. Even if you teach middle school, it’s so handy to have a syllabus ready for little things like, yes, using AI to answer questions IS cheating, and no, you can’t ask Siri to translate that for you. Putting those policies in place in a neatly organized handout is helpful to communicate to students and guardians about those expectations, and means you can point back to it if any hiccups occur. 

Now that you have your policies and procedures in place, it’s time for your sub binder and emergency sub plans. Maybe you’ve heard me tell this story before, but as a first year teacher I was super overwhelmed with all of the things we needed to know and I just didn’t get how to ask for a sub. So I didn’t. My entire first year teaching, I just didn’t ask for a sub, because I had no idea how that system worked.

Creating Your Sub Binder

Now that I know better, I highly recommend that you have backup plans for those days when you’re not feeling well, your home life has stuff going on, you need a mental health day, or maybe you’re traveling for some professional development! Whatever the case may be, having some easy to use sub plans is key.

Boundary Tips for First Year Teachers

The final piece that all of these policies and procedures are cultivating and protecting your work/life balance. At the end of the school day, how can you walk out the door and leave work at work? How do you build relationships with teacher friends who will help you set those healthy boundaries? This is something that might feel impossible to leave work for the next day, but with practice you’ll feel good about leaving at the end of the day!

Tips for New Teachers Part 4: Unit and Lesson Planning

This is one of my favorite parts of teaching: lesson planning! It’s so fun. Let’s look at comprehensible input in a Spanish classroom and how to incorporate CI when you have a set curriculum to follow that isn’t acquisition driven. 

Lesson Planning Tips for First Year Teachers

From there, or if you already feel like you have a good handle on CI, we’ll look at a lesson plan outline. This is more or less the plug and play template I like to use for every day’s lesson plan. Leaning on this template helps speed up lesson planning and is so powerful to keep from feeling overwhelmed!

Unit Planning Tips for First Year Teachers

Lesson planning is the day to day, but how do you know where you’re going? If you don’t have a curriculum or scope and sequence this can be tricky. Let’s chat about unit planning and different resources you can use to build those units out throughout the year.

Tips for New Teachers Part 5: Your First Few Weeks of School

It’s almost time for school to start! Unfortunately, student teachers don’t often get to be there for day one of the school year, so it can be a big wave of emotions for first-year teachers prepping for back to school. Excitement, nerves, stress, worry, anticipation – it’s all there, and more!

Here’s a few ideas to support you during those first few weeks of school:

• Lesson Plans for First Day of Spanish 1
• What to Do on the First Day of Spanish 2
• Your First Unit for Novices
• Getting to Know You Activities for Spanish Class
• The Ball Game Getting to Know You Activity
• First Month of School with Novices

Once you’ve made it through those first few weeks you can take a deep breath, then dive into the rest of the year!

Tips for New Teachers  Part 6: What’s next? Resources and Strategies to Try

At this point, I don’t want to leave you hanging, but you’re ready to take off into your own world you’ve created. I’m just going to share with you some of my favorite activities to do in your classroom. This list can be pretty overwhelming, so please do not try and do it all at once! 

Instead, apply the ideas I’ve shared here about testing one activity and putting it into rotation, or setting it aside, depending on how it works for your teaching style and the students in front of you this year. Here’s a list to dig into!

• 30 Activity Ideas
• Movie Talk
• Corre en Círculos Game
• Picture Talk
• 27 Activities for Stations in Spanish Class
• Running Dictation
• Tabata Timeline Reading Activity
• Low Prep Time Fillers
• Listening Activities
• Hands On Activities
• Creating Virtual Field Trips

If that’s not quite enough for you, be sure to dig into my blog for even more!

Tips for New Teachers  Part 7: Constant Learning

Even though this is your first year teaching, you probably already know something veteran teachers have accepted. As a teacher, you’re never done learning. It’s lots of hard work and there’s good days and bad days, but one thing you can do is keep growing and learning about best practice. 

This post has a round up of state and regional organizations, as well as in-person and virtual conference opportunities for world language teachers. I highly recommend getting connected wit your state org and talking to your admin early about how funds are distributed for professional development in your district. You can learn so much and develop great relationships by attending conferences!

First Year Spanish Teacher Advice

I hope this post has been helpful for you! Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you’re feeling stuck or overwhelmed in your teaching journey!

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