Mistakes Can Be Miracles

I am someone who gets discouraged easily when things go wrong in my classroom because I put my whole heart into everything involved with teaching. However, my wonderful co-workers quickly showed me how to use those mistakes to make myself stronger, better. We tell our kids all the time to keep trying and learn from what goes wrong, but why is it so hard to think of that ourselves?

My top 5 mistakes as a 1st year teacher
1. Worrying if the kids liked me- this REALLY inhibited my classroom management skills because I over analyzed what I knew I needed to do. I had read in many books that kids love structure and will like you more when you provide disciplined leadership yet it took be a while to believe that. I will post later about the wonders of responsive classroom management system but it will change your life, it sure changed mine!
2. Wanting everything to be perfect and go perfectly to plan- the kids will NOT know if you change the activity suddenly or if the cover page didn't print the way that you wanted it too. I am a perfectionist and want everything I give the kids to look pretty but our job is too important to get hung out on those types of details (but if we can make time for them- they're great!)
3. Knowing that you may not be able to give a child what they need- I care so deeply about all of my students that I always want to be the one of change their life and support them but sometimes there might be someone else in the school who can connect better or is trained in what the student needs and what is best for the student is to get them that help.
4. Questioning myself- I found that trusting my instinct on the fly when needed created some of the best lessons that I taught all year. I have wanted to teach for 23 years, I quickly realized that I was born to do this job and I should have confidence in myself! We all want to do this job for the reason of helping others and need to trust that our ideas are GREAT!
5. There is no one way to teach something- I was constantly comparing my lesson plans and activities with my co-workers thinking that I was doing something wrong but there are so many methods to teaching the same content. Every teacher needs to find their own personality in their lessons and create them based on their students and that could look different for EVERY teacher.

I am thankful for all of these realizations throughout the year because they are putting me on the road to being the best teacher I can be!

Write your mistakes down! I did and looking back at them now, I laugh and write down how I would change that situation applying everything I have learned since then.