Problems & Strategies

[MissC12]

Hi All!
I'm doing a project on problems that arise for beginning teachers and strategies are used to tackle these problems.

What problems did you have? What strategies did you use? Did your strategy work? If not, what was your alternate strategy?

Some categories where problems could arise:

Organizational Skills
Content Goals/Assessment
Classroom Management
Problem Solving
Instructional Strategy
Reflective Skills
Life-Long Learning

[DarrenB]

I'd add:

-interacting positively with parents
-dealing with the political structure of a school
-connecting meaningfully with students

I'm very interested in hearing from some of our newest professionals as well!

Darren

[silvana]

I would add lack of subject knowledge

[Want2Teach]

MissQUOTEC12;23230]H[=i All!
your strategy work? If not, what was your alternate strategy?

Some categories where problems could arise:
I'm doing a project on problems that arise for beginning teachers and strategies are used to tackle these problems.

What problems did you have? What strategies did you use? Did
Organizational Skills
Content Goals/Assessment
Classroom Management
Problem Solving
Instructional Strategy
Reflective Skills
Life-Long Learning[/QUOTE]

In reality, these challenges are no different than the strategies faced in the business world.

Organizational skills are required in business to maintain customer contacts, appointments, assignments, reporting, billing, collecting and any other aspect of running your business.

Content/Goals assessments are comparable to budgets and forecasts, and the important thing is to measure actual against projected performance.

Classroom management is similar to office management in that you have your workflow to manage (what you are going to do, when you are going to do it, how one step of a job is integrated to the next step, etc.), your people to manage (employees to motivate and evaluate), your feedback (actual compared to anticipated), your customers to react to (changes in plans and priorities), assessments (what can I improve, what is working well) etc. The difference is in the services you provide and the target audience.

Problem solving is a logical thinking process, identify the problem, prioritize the criteria of the solution, find potential solutions and evaluate the solutions based on the identified criteria. The solution that solves most of the problem within the confines of the given criteria is implemented.

Instructional Strategy is comparable to marketing strategy or may even be an aspect of your problem solving process. Who do you want to reach? What are the barriers of reaching the audience? What is required by the audience to make the encounter a success (in business - profitable, in the classroom - academic progress). What do you do if your first approach fails, develop a secondary and even a third method of getting the attention of your audience. Once you've gotten the customer (or student) what is your strategy to keep their interest and make them want more?

Reflective skills - self evaluation and comparison of goals and objectives to actual accomplishments over a given period of time. If your goals are well defined, and you organize your work to include the steps necessary to reach your goal, you're there!

Life-long learning - should be a part of everyone's life plan. Everything changes - interests, situations, technology, regulations, demographics and even the weather. To be successful in any career, you have to be flexible enough to change with the times, and keeping up is vital to this flexibility. Most any profession requires a certain amount of CPE (continuing professional education) and although many of the CPE programs are designed to be easy and painless, find the ones that are challenging. You might learn something!

These answers are based on how I ran my business (CPA office), but the basic tools will be incorporated into running a classroom. The bottom line is knowing what you plan to do, how you plan to do it, how you will measure your progress, how you will adjust your plan based on the feedback along the way, how you will overcome obstacles - expected and unexpected, how will you maintain customer satisfaction - student interest and participation, how will you improve your next assignment, and how will you stay abreast of changes in the field.