1. How much is an Australian Primary School Teacher's Salary?

2009 Australian Primary SchoolTeacher’s Salaries

2. What are the things that can make a classroom stressful for primary school teachers?

Teaching children can be a very rewarding experience.  It can also be a very stressful experience, particularly for beginning teachers.  The key is to know how you can reduce that classroom stress and after years of teaching the best place to start is with Organisation. 

Knowing what you are going to teach and how to teach it is extremely important. Being organised for yourself, your students and your classroom parents is vital to minimizing behaviour management and the key to a smooth running day.
 
A Survival Guide for Beginning Primary School Teachers focuses on getting you prepared right from day one with information on how to set up your classroom, what to have prepared for the first day, the first week, your first month, as well as complete lesson plans for the first five weeks of teaching.

3. What are some helpful teacher resources to have in your classroom?

For a beginning teacher building up valuable primary school educational resources is a must.  This can be quite a daunting task as there are thousands of educational resources on the market.  So I thought I would help you out by listing some of the primary school resources I use year after year in my classroom.

Some very helpful educational textbooks are:

• The Pocket Basics for English and Maths by Lyn Magree
• Crafty Rhymes by Helen Fletcher
• Classroom timesavers by Ashton Scholastic
• Multiply you maths marks by learning your times tables the fun and easy way by Gillian Miles
• A Sound Way by Elizabeth Love and Sue Reilly
• Proofreading and Editing by Gunter Schymkiw
• M100W Magic 100 words by Marcella Reiter

Other everyday classroom resources which are a must in the classroom:

• Daily lesson  plans
  
• Weekly plans
  
• Whole term overviews
  
• Stickers
  
• Hat, whistle & coffee cup
  
• Assessment folders for each child
  
• A Dictionary
  
• Alphabet charts
  
• 100 Most commonly used sightwords charts
  
• Numbers in words & numeral charts

Lastly my number one must have is my quick Five Minute Fillers which I use on a regular basis everyday in my classroom and that is why I have given them as a bonus for anyone who purchases my book online.

These are just a few from my essential resource kit which I rely on very heavily throughout the year.  In my book A Survival Guide for Beginning Primary School Teachers there are many more resources listed for every KLA subject that you are required to teach.

4. Why I feel so passionate about helping beginning teachers?

In past years our beginning teachers have almost been put into a 'sink or swim' environment.  It is so pleasing to see these days that Universities and Schools are taking a more active role in supporting our beginning teachers in their first year.  This year can encompass many emotions, fears and concerns and can be a painful initiation for a great deal of beginning teachers. Many of our beginning teachers feel overwhelmed, nervous and unprepared prior to beginning their first teaching position.  Getting started in a new school can be daunting, scary, a bombardment and sometimes very difficult.  It is not long till most beginning teachers go into ‘survival mode’ and start asking themselves,  “Can I make it through the day, the week, or even the year?” Can I really teach these children every day? Will I be accepted by my colleagues?”  Is this really what I want to do with my life day in day out?

As an experienced classroom teacher who has supported many prac students and more recently a University tutor supporting graduating University students, it is this ‘survival mode’ or first term of teaching, which has my greatest interest. Teaching is not a 9-3 job with great holidays if you are going to be a successful teacher.  It is a lot of hard work and the majority of that work is done in your own time.   You need to be organised and be prepared to put in the hard yards particular in your first couple of years.  Your first term will be extremely busy as you will quickly learn 8:30 – 3 is for teaching and then you have to spend many more hours doing your planning and getting yourself familiar and established in your classroom environment, as well as your school environment. Most beginning teachers are enthusiastic, conscientious and hard working people who spend long hours at school during the week, and often a great deal of their weekends setting up their classrooms. It is due to these first term pressures that I decided to produced my book. It is my intention to provide some support to you as a beginning teacher by guiding you through your first term as a professional teacher and by doing this alleviate some of that stress by having you more prepared. First term is quite daunting for most as it is a time of year that you have never had the pleasure of witnessing because of the timing of prac placements which for most are carried out in the middle of the year.  Therefore for a lot of beginning teachers knowing how to get started is a little mind boggling. So for the contents of my book I asked many beginning teachers where they felt they needed more support. This is what was conveyed to me and all of these questions are answered in a great deal of detail in my book:

How do I get started day 1, first week and first term?
How do I deal successfully with Behaviour Management?
How do I establish good communication with my parents?
What assessment and recording do I need to be keeping?
How do I know what to teach in areas such as spelling, phonics, handwriting etc….
How do I find time to plan when there is so many other things to be done?
    
I have seen a lot of great teachers come into our schools only to leave after 2 or 3 years because of the lack of support and the pressures placed on them.  For some beginning teachers, how they survive the first year, if they do, can be a significant factor in their decision to remain in the profession. Teaching is one of the most rewarding careers you can have and sure you are going to have tough days but for me personally the rewards far out way the challenges.  

As an experienced educator, I feel I can play a major role in helping our beginning teachers get established in their first year of teaching. While I can’t personally show you in my classroom each year I can try to reach out to many more through my book, “A Survival Guide for Beginning Primary School Teachers”.

 It is important that our beginning teachers feel supported in their quest to become educators.  It is my opinion, that we owe this to our beginning teachers who have worked hard to fulfil their dream of becoming a teacher and more importantly we owe it to the children they are teaching.

5. Why I value Lesson Plans.

While lesson plans can be brief or very detailed, I believe they are an essential part of classroom organisation. Lesson plans help to guide you in being organised with your material and the delivery of your lesson so that your students can achieve the intended learning outcome for that lesson.  Lesson planning is also a very good way of keeping behaviour management under control.  Most of the first year teachers I have had the privilege of mentoring at my school or tutoring at University have expressed that behaviour management is the area they fear the most.   Using lesson plans is one way of combating behavioural issues.  Writing out a plan of how and what you want to teach in a lesson will help to ensure you keep the children focussed and on task with what is expected of them.  It also allows you to go over the lesson in your head when writing it so you get an idea of how you are going to deliver the lesson before you have to teach it to your class. In other words it gets you mentally prepared for what your role will be during the lesson and what the expectations of your children are as well. Planning a lesson is much more difficult than delivering it as there are many elements that you need to consider:
Time of the lesson, duration of the lesson, number of students involved, grouping of students, age level of students, age appropriate resources and materials, special need considerations, how do you begin, deliver and finish the lesson, what do you want the children to achieve, how do you want them to participate in the lesson etc…….
As you become more confident as a teacher your lesson plans will get shorter and shorter and there will be some lessons that you will be able to teach off the top of your head.  Having said that though after all my years of experience in the classroom I still write brief notes on what I am going to teach each day and how I will teach it, particularly when I am introducing a new concept in mathematics or introducing a new genre in English. Lesson planning is a very valuable tool which I feel sometimes gets overlooked.