First Year Teacher Checklist
The first year of teaching is difficult for reasons that are largely structural rather than personal, and knowing which difficulties are normal is worth a surprising amount.
Almost everything that goes wrong in a first year falls into two categories: procedures that were never explicitly taught, and work that expanded because no limit was set on it.
This checklist is organised by when things actually matter rather than by importance, because the second week is not when to be thinking about assessment design.
The week before students arrive
Notice that lesson content is one item of six. New teachers overwhelmingly over-invest in content and under-invest in procedure, and the first month punishes that ordering specifically.
- Walk your room and decide where students enter, where work is handed in, where materials live. Every one of those needs a procedure.
- Write your first-day script — literally, word for word. You will be more nervous than you expect.
- Find the people: the office manager, the custodian, the department head, the person who knows how the copier works. These relationships pay off all year.
- Learn the systems you will need in week one — attendance, gradebook, incident reporting. Not all of them; those three.
- Prepare the first two weeks of lessons. Not the term. Two weeks is the buffer that lets you survive the first surprise.
- Get the class lists and start on names now.
The first month
Teach procedures explicitly and practise them until they are boring — this is the single highest-return use of September and it feels like wasted time while you are doing it.
Learn every name in the first fortnight. It is the fastest available way to change how a room feels, and there is no substitute for it.
Make a positive contact home for two students a week, starting in week one. By half-term you will have spoken to a third of your families about something good, and every subsequent conversation is easier.
Set a stop time and hold it for at least three nights a week. The work is genuinely infinite, and the limit has to come from you because it will not come from the job.
Find the colleague who will answer a stupid question without making you feel stupid. Everyone needs one, and identifying them early matters more than any resource.
What costs new teachers their evenings
The marking line is the largest and the most fixable. Not every piece of work needs a comment, and a stack sorted into three piles with a whole-class response tomorrow teaches more than thirty individual comments that took four hours.
| Habit | What it costs | What to do instead |
|---|---|---|
| Marking everything | 6–10 hours a week | Mark selectively; sort rather than grade |
| Writing full plans daily | 5–8 hours a week | Six-line plans for your own use |
| Making resources from scratch | 4–6 hours a week | Adapt a colleague's; ask first |
| Answering email at all hours | Ongoing, invisible | Two fixed windows a day |
| Reteaching alone after a bad lesson | Compounding | Ask the person who teaches it well |
| Saying yes to every extra | The whole year | One commitment, chosen deliberately |
The rest of the year, roughly
- October — the hard month. Novelty has gone and competence has not arrived. This is normal and it is not a signal about your suitability.
- November — conferences. Prepare specifics per student; it is the term's biggest single preparation load.
- January — the reset. Reteach every procedure as though it is September, because it effectively is.
- February — the second hard month, and the one where people make decisions about the profession. Wait until April to make any.
- March–April — the year where you are finally teaching rather than surviving. Start keeping notes for next year now, while it is fresh.
- May–June — assessment, reports, and writing down what you would change. That last document is the most valuable thing you produce all year.
Asking for help without looking incapable
New teachers systematically under-ask, on a theory that asking reveals a deficiency. In practice experienced colleagues read frequent, specific questions as professionalism and silence as a warning sign.
Ask specifically. "How do you get them settled after lunch?" gets a usable answer; "do you have any advice?" gets a platitude. Specific questions are also easier to answer, which is why people answer them.
Observe other teachers, deliberately and early, and ask to be observed by someone whose feedback you want rather than only by whoever is required to. An informal observation you invited is a completely different experience from an evaluation.
Where something is genuinely going wrong with a class, raise it before it becomes established. A problem in week four is a conversation; the same problem in week twelve is a pattern the class has learned.
What to keep for next year
Keep the annotated plans — the ones with the three lines about what took longer and what you would cut. Those are worth more next August than any resource you could buy.
Keep a running list of the procedures that failed and why. Most first-year classroom trouble traces back to a specific unclear procedure, and the list is what stops you repeating it.
Keep two or three pieces of student work you were proud of, and a note about what produced them. February of your second year is when you will want them.
Keep the record of what you were told in observations, whether or not you agreed. Read it in June rather than in the moment — a good deal of it makes more sense once the year has finished.
Frequently asked questions
Decide the procedures for every recurring moment in the room, write a first-day script, learn attendance and gradebook systems, prepare two weeks of lessons rather than a term, and start on names.
Mostly structurally. Procedures that were never explicitly taught cause daily friction, and the workload expands to fill whatever time is available because nothing external limits it. Both are fixable and neither is about capability.
Mark selectively rather than everything, write six-line plans for your own use, adapt colleagues' resources instead of building from scratch, and set a stop time you hold at least three nights a week.
October and February, fairly reliably. The novelty has gone and the competence has not arrived yet. Both are normal, and neither is a good moment to make a decision about the profession.