DKG California Support Team for Emerging Professionals

High Quality Anchor Charts One of the best ways to support your students’ independence is to create high quality anchor charts. Anchor charts are helpful in the following ways: Keep the learning alive on the walls of your classroom. Support independence because students can access them as needed. Can hold visuals to help cement the learning. Can help to make expectations really clear. Can be used to illustrate processes as well as examples of what work should look like. Can be used for behavioral as well as academic information. Tips for creating really high quality anchor charts: Make a plan ahead of time but create charts while the children are present. Have children do some of the writing. Add as many visuals as possible, students can even help pick which pictures to use. Use as few words as possible. Use dark ink for the text of the chart, preferably black, use colored ink for emphasis. Simple drawings can be just as powerful as compl...

Mindfulness: Not A Passing Fad Mindfulness programs and processes have been expanding throughout the United States and other countries as school districts and  teachers promote and adopt it for their classrooms. Students are being introduced to and are practicing mindful breathing, observation, awareness, and listening. The question is will mindfulness be laid aside at some point, or will the process survive? Veteran educators have seen the pendulum swing as one educational approach has  been adopted and then left on the wayside when something else comes along. There are several reasons mindfulness will survive. First of all, mindfulness will will continue to be a part of the educational system as long as people in our society experience stress and anxiety. In today’s 24/7 society our senses are constantly bombarded and stressed by the world’s issues. Instantaneous access to the dramas played out in society can effect our well-being. Just as our bodies require food...

  Teaching Procedures Many veteran teachers will tell you that the two most important things you can do during the first weeks of school are to teach procedures and routines and to build your classroom community. This blog post concerns the first point about teaching routines and procedures. Some tips for teaching procedures: Model exactly what you want the students to do and have them practice it over and over until they are doing it exactly the way you expect them to. Make a list of all the routines/procedures students need to know in order to be successful in your classroom and put them right into your lesson plans. Some examples of procedures that most teachers have are:quiet signal, how to enter the classroom in the morning, bathroom, how to walk in the hallway, how to get/store supplies, how/when to take a break, how to interact on the rug/at desks etc., how to pack up at the end of the day. Focus primarily on teaching procedures and building community the f...

Educators are very good at meeting the needs of their students, their families and anyone else who may need their help. We go into education because we care for others and want to make the world a better place. What we are not always great at is taking care of our own needs. In theory we know that we can’t really take care of others until we have taken care of ourselves but in practice that is often the very thing we try to do. When we do not take this time we run the risk of burnout and worse. There has been a lot of research lately about teachers and resilience. There are two resources in particular that teachers can turn to in order to work on building their own resilience: Elena Aguilar’s Onward and Angela Watson’s website. Elena Aguilar has done extensive research in the area of teacher resilience. In her book Onward she identifies the twelve key habits of resilient educators. She has thoughtfully paired each habit to correspond with a month of the school year. She has also...

The Support Team for Emerging Professionals (STEP) offers support for educational professionals. This support includes tips for teachers and opportunities to share the latest educational trends and philosophies. We want to know the challenges early career educators are experiencing and provide a voice and venue for these challenges.

Welcome to our new blog! We are going to be providing timely and helpful information and tips for new as well as more veteran educators.  Our schedule of blogs for 2018-2019 Month Topic August 2018 Teacher Resilience September 2018 Establishing Classroom Procedures October 2018 Mindfulness For Teachers November 2018 High Quality Anchor Charts January 2019 Culturally Responsive Teaching February 2019 Mindfulness in the Classroom March 2019 Fine Motor Skills April 2019 Emerging Writer’s Workshop