Fresh out of college, at age 21, I got my first teaching job. I was so excited to finally have my own classroom and get to know my students! I spent the summer collecting supplies and writing lesson plans, only to begin the year feeling like I was completely unprepared!

If you are getting ready to start your first (or second, third, tenth…) year of teaching, I am here to give you the advice I wish I would have received before the school year started.

Here are 5 things I wish I'd known as a first year teacher:

1. Structure FIRST, then relationships!

One of the pieces of advice I heard most in my teaching program and student teaching was “Relationships are the KEY to classroom management.” Relationships are so important in the classroom, especially for secondary teachers. Strong relationships will make your classroom more smooth, engaging, and fun for you and the students! At the risk of being controversial, however, I would say that relationships alone are not enough.

Something essential that this advice ignores is that relationship building takes TIME. While you may connect with some students within the first week of school, this is rarely the case for your entire class. So, if you rely purely on relationships like I did my first month of school, you will struggle. Some students needed a couple of months to warm up to me as their new teacher, and in the meantime I had no other strategies to manage my classroom! This caused my first months to be filled with chaos and last minute management systems.

My advice to you is: Start your classroom management with a strong foundation of structure that will allow you to build lasting relationships! Create routines and systems in your classroom that clarify and reinforce your expectations. This will give you something to rely on while those relationships are still forming. By the middle of the year, your combination of structure and relationships will have your classroom running like a well-oiled machine!

For more about my classroom management strategies, check out my articles 6 Classroom Systems You NEED This Year and I Started Jobs in My Secondary Classroom

2. Use your shortcuts, resources, and anything that makes your life easier!

While I was preparing for my first year, I felt determined to create all of my lessons from scratch. I wanted every lesson to be as original and personalized as possible, and I loved the feeling of teaching a lesson I made myself. While this resulted in many proud teaching moments, it also took so much time! I spent evenings and weekends lesson planning, and I burnt out quickly.

To avoid lesson plan burn out, you have to use your resources. There are so many free resources available for you, whether that be from your colleagues or online! Don’t feel ashamed or embarrassed if all of your lessons aren’t “yours,” you’ll have the time to change it later on (or not!). There is no need to reinvent the wheel every single lesson, so use what you have!

Some of my favorite resources are:

1. Canva: Canva is a lifesaver for creating literally anything for your classroom. It has thousands of free templates available, as well as easy to use features for you to create your own! Create worksheets, slideshows, posters, newsletters, resumes, banners, social media posts, videos, infographics, and more! You can access quite a bit with a free Canva account, but you can also get Canva Premium FREE by signing up through your school for Canva for Education.

2. TeachersPayTeachers: There are so many resources available on TpT, and many of them are free! If you want free resources, simply search for what you want, click the “Sort by” drop down, and choose “Price (Ascending).” This will bring all the free resources to the top of the page.

P.S.: Check out my TpT for some free back to school resources! @RosemaryInsights

3. SlidesGo: This website is my go to for fun, engaging GoogleSlides or PowerPoint templates. All you have to do is sign up with your email and you get 5 free downloads a month!

4. YouTube: I know, basic. Seriously, YouTube has so many great videos to use in your classroom! You can even find some movies and documentaries for free. YouTube is also great for timers and background noise to create a structured and calming classroom environment!

3. Sometimes, the best thing you can do is CLOSE YOUR DOOR!

As teachers, most of us are pretty social people (at least social enough to want to spend our days surrounded by others!). I love chatting with anyone and everyone I meet, which results in some great relationships! BUT what it also results in is entire plan periods spent on gossip, venting, and negative feelings!

Don’t get me wrong, being a teacher is not easy and we definitely deserve time to vent and bond with our coworkers over shared struggles. However, sometimes these conversations can take a negative moment and amplify it by one thousand. Also, not all of these conversations will stay between you and your coworkers. If you get too comfortable with the wrong people, your words might spread around the building like wildfire! So please, be careful who you trust!

Additionally, we only have so much social energy, and we already spend a lot of it while teaching! Sometimes the best thing you can do for your mental health and overall attitude is to close your door! Put in your headphones and reset. If somebody needs you, they know where to find you.

4. Pick your battles.

This goes along with classroom management and closing that door! When I started my first year, I thought I could carry the weight of the school on my shoulders! When I wasn’t teaching, I was monitoring the halls and chasing down students, even though I wasn’t asked to! This led to every minute of my day being spent on behavior management, which was SO draining.

In the classroom, you have to choose your non-negotiables. If a student uses a pen instead of a pencil, is it really worth the power struggle? For me, the answer is no. We all have our own boundaries as teachers, but my advice to you is to be picky about the battles you choose. If you choose to fight them all, you are going to have long, draining days that leave you (and your students) feeling frustrated.

Outside of your classroom, you gotta close that door! Rowdy students in the hallway are distracting, but they are not always your responsibility! It sounds selfish now, but once you start the year you will understand, “Not your circus, not your monkeys!” Focus on preparing and maintaining your classroom before you step into that hallway.

5. Don’t be so hard on yourself!

If you are anything like me, you are putting pressure on yourself to be the best teacher ever, immediately. From lesson plans to decorations to relationships, you are a perfectionist looking to ROCK your first year. Well, I am here to tell you that even if your first year is not perfect, you got this.

I had so many moments during my first year where I felt insecure, unmotivated, and defeated. Some of my lessons fell flat, my rowdy class didn’t respond to any management strategies, and my grading was wayyyy behind. I felt like nothing I did was good enough.

At the end of the year, however, something changed. I got the opportunity to hear from my students at the end of the year. In a feedback form on the end of my final, my students recognized the time, effort, and care that I put into my classroom. Even my most challenging students expressed their love and appreciation for me as their teacher. Although I felt like I was constantly failing, I was doing amazing in their eyes.

Please remember: You are enough for your students, your school, and yourself. Your hard work is seen and appreciated, even if you don’t always hear it.

To read more about my first year experience, read my article 7 Mistakes I Made as a First Year Teacher