Teaching is one of the most underestimated jobs in the workforce. For the elementary education field especially, a plethora of work, social skills, time, and effort is put into teaching every single day. Teaching doesn’t start when you get your first job, and teaching doesn’t end when school gets out for the day. It takes time, experience, effort, and many mistakes to learn how to become a great teacher, and it takes even more to continuously be a good teacher. After doing research, conducting interviews, and looking at the course layout for the Elementary Education major, I’ve collected information to correctly inform anyone studying to become an Elementary Educator of what kind of lesson planning, social skills, and time is put into being an excellent teacher. Following this paper will show you how important it is to be a good teacher and what kind of work is involved in being a good teacher, however, you must want to be a good teacher, on top of the workload and time, in order to become one.

Figure 1. Questions on Teaching. Photo Source: http://chiasuanchong.com/tag/lesson-plans/

     Lesson planning is one of the biggest parts of teaching. When I asked my grandmother, Sharon Menzies -- a former second grade teacher, a remedial reading teacher for first and second grade, and ultimately a guidance counselor, in an interview how much time she spent lesson planning per week; she said she spent “approximately 2 hours after school each day, and 6+ hours over the weekend.”  Lesson planning is much more than just following a schedule of what the children are supposed to learn each day, it’s planning what you want to teach, how you want to teach it, how you want to reinforce what they learned, how you can make it interesting to learn about, and what activities that are educational and fun for them to practice. Birkeland states; “Educational ideals are expressed in the everyday activities of the kindergarten teachers, but also through what they say and how they explain their own practice." Being an elementary teacher, you need to think like a five year old, and create colorful, short, but effective activities for your children to actually accomplish. It’s important to come up with a way to teach something in a short amount of time adequately, knowing that the students aren’t going to be able to focus on the same thing for more than 30 minutes. It is imperative to know how to teach to continuously keep the children interested as well as perceptive to what you’re teaching. Anyone could tell you that the mind of a five year old isn’t going to stay focused for very long, and they won’t even begin to focus unless what’s being taught is something colorful, bold, and about little animals (or a song, or about trucks, cars, etc.)

Figure 2. Mapping Lesson Planning Photo Source:https://sites.google.com/site/tourorkhiyayeva/lesson-plans-for-special-ed

     Students in elementary school are taught the basics; reading, alphabet, colors, numbers, and music. Teachers can use many different ways to teach their students in order to keep them interested in the lesson; “Kindergarten and elementary school teachers help students learn and apply important concepts. Many teachers use a hands-on approach, such as the use of props, to help students understand abstract concepts, solve problems, and develop critical thinking skills” (Bureau of Labor Statistics). When I was in kindergarten, my teacher always had "Mr. Foxy" for the student who stood out to her the most to bring home for the weekend. Obviously we all got a chance to bring him home, but it was such an honor nevertheless. It motivated us to participate, engage in the lesson, and do good on our assessments. Teachers almost have to relearn the basics in order to learn how to properly teach them to their students. Teaching elementary takes a lot of patience, being that most of the time the students will lose interest, not understand, and not follow directions. Not a lot of time is spent in individual work, being that help, re-explaining, and attention is needed while doing work, so an elementary teacher is constantly involved, and constantly teaching. You can’t teach a student the alphabet and expect them to know how to write it. You can’t just teach a student how to write the alphabet, and then expect them to write an essay. You would continuously help them learn to pronounce, recognize, and write “cat” or “dog”, and then help them practice about one hundred times. Such as, candy prizes for those who want to come up and write it on the board; or jumble up the letters and have them fix the letters into the write order. Small, short exercises go a long way. 

        It takes a deluge of patience to teach any age, but elementary school especially because it’s the absolute basics. It takes time to learn how to be an excellent teacher in all aspects, you need to learn how you like to do things, what is good, and what is bad, and what kids like to learn about and what they don’t. “Once teachers have been in the classroom for a year or two, who is very good—and very bad—becomes much clearer” (Ripley). A good teacher loves their job, a good teacher wants to teach, wants to understand how her students are thinking, and wants to help them. A good teacher can be a good teacher no mater how they teach mathematics and reading, as long as they love teaching it, and their students love to learn it. It takes time and effort to learn what the right things to do are and what the right things to teach are for you, but it’s worth it. Some teachers are big on certain subjects, some think certain lessons are more important than others, it all depends on what type of teacher you are to find what is "right". There are an overabundance of guides on what to teach and how to teach it, “educators of early childhood students should promote language arts through vocabulary development in the classroom whenever possible” (Lazaros 10). There are plenty of references and classes that fully teach you what it is that your students need to learn, along with a weekly schedule of what you should be teaching and what certain things students should know in what grades. Most common people know that in kindergarten; you learn ABCs, second grade; cursive, fourth grade; multiplication tables, and so on. Stressing the importance of spelling through spelling bee’s, spelling tests, vocabulary tests - all with small rewards, is imperative in teaching elementary. Elementary school is where children learn the basics, in order for them to learn how to write full sentences, speak correct grammar, and have legible handwriting later on in life.

        Being able to assess if your students are learning what you’re teaching them in the right amount of time is obligatory. If your students aren’t understanding and retaining what you’re teaching them, they aren’t the problem, the teacher is. Coming up with enough activities to help the students remember what they learned and correctly testing them throughout the year is a part of lesson planning. As I stated earlier, it could be something as easy as a short game, or fixing letters into the right place. Any type of extra practice and small assessment helps. It also helps to reward children with a gummy bear, or pencil, or any type of small prize to show them that they learned, retained, and remembered well enough that they get a prize; and will continue to get small prizes if they continue to pay attention and do their classwork. If a student is falling behind, it is important to give extra help to them in order for them to catch up. Having frequent assessments to find out where children are having a hard time is one of the most important tasks of a teacher. Tests and quizzes are a way of seeing what you need to focus more on in the class, and what the students understand and don’t need to hear as much about; “Administer standardized ability and achievement tests and interpret results to determine student strengths and areas of need” (California Career Zone). Even if it’s a short quiz once a week, it’s an easy way to find out if you’re teaching the right things in the right way. Administering tests and creating your own quizzes is one of many writing tasks as an Elementary teacher, or any teacher. When I asked Robin Florence, my former kindergarten teacher, in the interview, “What type of assessment’s do you use in order to discover if your students are learning the right things in the right amount of time?” She explained that, every day after teaching, she would ask the class questions to make sure that they were listening while she was teaching, and understood what they were supposed to learn. Robin taught for twenty years in kindergarten, and has since moved onto special education.

        Like I previously stated, assessment doesn’t always have to be a test. Some teachers can assess what their students are learning or have learned just by their participation in class and their work that’s done in exercises. Assessment can be a fun game where students have to answer questions, or even completing a worksheet, or going home and teaching what you learned that day to your parents. Most young students love to “be the teacher”. Having a student of the week who gets to teach the class is a way to inspire the students to really want to learn what they need to learn well enough to try and teach it to the entire class. Assessment doesn’t necessarily mean test, it just means assess the progress of the student based on what the teacher has been teaching. Assessment of the students is also for the teacher, to determine if the way they are teaching is working for the class. More examples of assessments could be a class activity, partnered activities, races to see who can do it fastest, or even one on one teacher and student practicing while other students work in groups. 

Figure 3. Typical Duties of Elementary School Teachers. Photo Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.

     Another important job for elementary school teachers is displaying and explaining the improvement and progress of the students to their parents. A reason that this is subject mostly to elementary school, is as you get older, you are expected to learn and be responsible for yourself. You wouldn’t have a parent/teacher conference when your child is in college, because you aren’t responsible for them any longer. In high school, parents are only brought into situations where they are needed, as in discipline or failing grades. In elementary school and sometimes middle school even, parents are frequently updated and involved in their child’s school. The older you become, the more independent you become, so in elementary school you’re entirely dependent on your parents. Teachers are constantly called “mom” by accident, and it’s the first time your child, as a parent, is with someone else all day long. It is important as an elementary teacher to gain the trust of each parent, let them know that not only are you a good teacher but a good supervisor, and that while you are teaching these students you will also be watching over them. Weekly emails, phone calls, or even take home projects can all be a way of including the parent in the childs education. It is also extraordinarily important that the parent knows that you have also gained the trust of their child so they can feel safe leaving them. “…if a mutual trust evolves between the parent and the teacher, the extent and commitment to the partnership will increase. On the contrary, if trust between these parties is not developed or is lost, then the commitment to this relationship will begin to diminish, as will feelings of engagement” (Mahmood 60). Parent teacher relationships are tough, imperative, and a key part in being a successful teacher.

Figure 4. Parent Teacher Communication. Photo Source: http://www.edu.pe.ca/gulfshore/indexold.html

     Everything is interconnected as an elementary educator, lesson planning, teachers, students, parents, and assessment. None of it would fully work without the other components, and all compiled together fully help a student grow and learn in their early years of education. Teaching is not just teaching a lesson for the day, it’s much more than that, and it takes hard work and determination to become one. Working with parents, combined with learning to socialize with young children, and knowing what to teach and how to teach it are what make elementary education so hard, but worth it.