Student Behavior

Student behavior is something that can dictate the entire classroom and day. Its these ranging behaviors that can cause the day to be spectacular or one of the worst days in the classroom. Knowing this, student behavior is something first-time teachers don't know how to handle due to inexperience or scared about handling it. To me, personally, this is the second most important thing for teachers to figure out in a classroom right behind their identity as a teacher.

This article from Scholastic is a gives great tips on how to handle situations such as words to use, things you can do in the situation, and even gives you tips on how to handle a situation if personalities don't quite mesh. In my opinion some of these tips can be useful in a secondary classroom especially the tips about clashing personalities, and things you can do as a teacher to calm yourself down before handling the situation. However, most of the other tips would be better used for an elementary classroom. On the flip side these tips can help students handle conflicting situations on their own something a lot of students don't know how to do. It would help them think before they use their fists. It might be difficult to instill, but it might help down the road.

Even though student behavior can be a dictating force their are things you can do to try to not make it that. The best way to figure out how to handle students in different situations is to do teacher observations is various different classrooms. This will help give new and upcoming teachers different ways to handle students. For me personally, I'm not scared. I have had previous experience dealing with students, but I know it will be different when I'm in charge of my own classroom. At first it'll be difficult, but will become easier over time.

Teacher Idenity

Going from college classes to student teacher to finally a teacher is the natural progression in the education of teachers. What people don't realize or understand is that until we are a teacher we identify ourselves still as students. This search for our identity as a teacher can make the first few years of teaching that much more difficult.

This topic and many others are covered in a book called, Early Career English Teachers in Action. In chapter () all the personal narratives cover teachers telling stories about how they found their own identity as a teacher. Reading these stories help beginner teachers not feel alone, and gives insight to what it's really like as you transition from student to teacher, like me,

Topics like teacher identity are extremely important for teachers to discuss and know about in their first few years of teaching for many reasons. One being that it helps with classroom management as well as increased confidence for the teacher. Both are very important things when it comes to running to a classroom. This important step in forming an identity makes you become the teacher you need to be and want to be as your career goes further on. This article is a personal experience of a student teacher turning into a teacher herself. https://ed.psu.edu/englishpds/inquiry/projects/yerkes04.htm