When You're the New Teacher: 28 Strategies to Align Your Good Intentions with Your Teaching Practices

Self-directed, self-paced professional learning teachers can use to build agency and improve their practice, with easy-to-digest ideas that can be implemented in the classroom the next day.

Teachers start their professional journey with a clear aim: to teach well so students thrive socially, emotionally, and academically. All too often, though, the hard realities of teaching (mandated curricula, scripted lesson plans, overloaded schedules, students' personal struggles) hamper the best of intentions. Navigating these challenges and avoiding burnout calls for teachers to build strong relationships among colleagues, students, families, and communities. Those relationships in turn help teachers create contexts for deep learning, reflection, and student-centered instruction. This book provides strategies and tools for doing all this.

This must-have resource:

• Provides student teachers and new teachers with a clear set of actions to move into their position and teach well right from the start.
• Offers practical, step-by-step guidance for building relationships with colleagues and administrators, affirming students' identities, navigating challenges with other professionals, and putting love and care at the heart of teaching.
• Helps educators build a foundation and philosophy for teaching and collaborating and includes stories from educators and sample dialogues.

Dr. Elizabeth Soslau wrote this book to be a resource for self-directed, self-paced professional learning that teachers could use to develop and improve their practice, with easy-to-digest ideas that can be implemented in the classroom the next day. It's a guide that every student teacher, in-service teacher, host teacher, and student teaching field instructor needs.

Dr. Elizabeth Soslau is a professor in the School of Education at the University of Delaware. She focuses her teaching, research, and service efforts on tzedakah (justice) and tikkun olam (repair the world). Her research focuses on experiential learning opportunities in classrooms, schools, and the community. Elizabeth seeks to explore and enhance teaching practices that support teachers' and students' understandings of systemic social ills, develop critical consciousness, and strengthen their voice and activism skills.

She is the author of The Comprehensive Guide to Working with Student Teachers (Teachers College Press) and When You're the New Teacher (Free Spirit Publishing). Her work has appeared in outlets such as the Journal of Teacher Education, Teaching and Teacher Education, Journal for Multicultural Education, Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship, and The Jewish Exponent. She is also a reviewer for numerous journals, a long-time board member of the Philadelphia-based nonprofit Need in Deed, and serves on the International Advisory Board for the Studying Teacher Education journal.

Her clinical work includes teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in critical reflection, equity, urban education, case study methods, and action research.

Elizabeth's other important work is serving as a very proud mother of the hilarious and creative Harry Counter. She is also a dedicated partner to Chris Counter. Before pursuing her Ph.D., Elizabeth taught middle school in the School District of Philadelphia. She lives and works in the Delaware Valley area.