The Whole Child

All educators, including early career teachers, are the frontline of mental health prevention for students. Teachers and other school staff often develop a close relationship with their students enabling them to be among the first to recognize a possible mental health issue. Mental health issues can impact academic achievement and peer relationships. Students benefit from instruction on how to handle stress or overcome adversity. Understanding mental health, recognizing behavioral and emotional issues, and utilizing data-driven strategies aids early career teachers in addressing students' mental health needs.

Classroom Management 3.0

The impact of a poorly managed classroom on the health, well-being, and instruction of students, along with commensurate effects on the educational delivery and teacher efficacy has expanded nationally across school systems. There are often dire consequences of a poorly managed classroom, which includes teacher burnout, missed educational opportunities, increase absences of both students and teachers, poor test scores, educator fatigue, increase discipline and referrals, and reports of job dissatisfaction. While information about classroom management has proliferated, the art of implementing effective classroom management strategies across multitiered grades, content areas, and activities has not occurred in a seamless consistent manner. In this chapter, the literature on effective classroom management processes with multi-system approaches for delivery are suggested for providing cogent actions and strategies to educators in their daily practice. Critical issues and trends, perceptible strategies, and methods for implementation are covered.

Alternative Education

Many students struggle with success in a traditional school settings. For that reason, alternative education programs exist to support these students through high school graduation and to post-secondary endeavors. Students in alternative education come from varying backgrounds and have differing needs; therefore, programs targeting these students need to meet each individual's needs. Students may have behavioral or emotional concerns, academic deficits, be pregnant or parenting teenagers, or have severe trauma backgrounds. Alternative education needs to focus on school culture, student engagement, academic interventions, behavioral interventions, and social-emotional learning. The ultimate goal of alternative education is to help all students succeed no matter their needs and ease their transition to a traditional school, post-secondary education, career, military, or other ventures. This chapter will outline alternative education and how to implement strategies in all settings.

Applying Self-Care to Strategically Prevent Burnout in Early Career K-12 Teachers

This chapter explores potential sources of burnout for early career K-12 teachers, or those with less than five years of classroom experience. After a discussion of burnout and compassion fatigue, this chapter will present strategies for building positive relationships, developing and engaging in effective mentor programs, and current best practices in self-care. The discussion will include a presentation of steps one can take to promote and effectively manage mental and physical health to improve personal and professional relationships. This chapter will bring together resources, ideas, and information to help early career teachers to view themselves, their classrooms, and their relationships with students, parents, peers, and administrators from a different perspective through the building of positive relationships, collaboration efforts, and mentorship. The chapter will conclude with a list of examples of best practices in self-care to aid early career teachers in better serving themselves, their students, and their learning community.

Building a Safe Learning Environment by Remembering to Smile

This chapter provides the theoretical underpinnings that support the importance of a smile, social and emotional learning and its components, the benefits of integrating social and emotional learning skills within instruction, and specific classroom strategies. Early career teachers will have a solid understanding of each of the five components of social and emotional learning and how they can be effectively implemented into the classroom to develop the social and emotional needs of students required for learning to take place.

Becoming an Intersectional Educator

For the early service educator, the process of becoming an intersectional educator is the result of critical engagement with theory that leads to practice. This chapter describes that process through a problem-oriented teaching method for building critical consciousness called the developmental spiral of critical consciousness (DSCC). The DSCC prepares early service educators for culturally responsive and sustaining teaching and learning, involves a design grounded in transformative and intersectional theories, and empowers early service educators to become more preemptive and intentionally active participants in their professional growth. This chapter provides a description of the design and theoretical assumptions for critical consciousness foundational to the DSCC and its applicability for early service educators. This chapter also includes a detailed and embedded image of the DSCC to help educators navigate the developmental process.

Improving Teacher Professional Learning

This chapter examines the role of effective teacher professional learning as a support for early career teachers. It establishes the importance of teacher professional learning as a mechanism of increasing student achievement and investigates traditional professional development models' ineffectiveness. This chapter also includes a discussion of the merits of the cycle of inquiry model of teacher professional learning and explores the need to develop teachers as whole persons. The author identifies effective professional learning for teachers and asserts best practices for school administrators, district leaders, decision-makers, and other stakeholders to design and implement effective teacher professional learning that ultimately increases student achievement. This chapter concludes that cycles of inquiry that develop the whole teacher will enhance teacher professional learning and offer the greatest and most effective support for early career teachers.

The Need for Access

With the growth of the special education population and the advancement of technology and accessible instruments and devices, teachers require an understanding of both mandated and available tools to integrate them into the educational environment appropriately. This chapter examines three specific aspects of the accessibility process. First, it explores the need to provide assistive technology to students in all educational environments and the compounding issues that affect that access. Second, it discusses the principles and prevalence of AT in schools. Third, it describes instructional approaches and stakeholder responsibilities when incorporating AT into educational settings. With a grasp on AT and its components, as well as issues of access and equity, teachers can better serve all of their students.

Building Positive Student and Teacher Relationships With Restorative Practice

When there is a lack of a positive student-teacher relationships, students struggle with their behavior, motivation, and academics. When a teacher has a negative relationship with their students, their students disengage from the classroom and begin to question why school is an important component in their life. Creating a positive student-teacher relationship is a necessary component for an early-career teacher to make. When an early-career teacher works to create meaningful relationships with their students, their students show improvement with behavior, motivation, and academics. This chapter highlights how positive student-teacher relationships bring out the best in students and provides a research-based program that has shown positive results in transforming the classroom climate to a positive, safe environment because of positive relationships.

Meaningful Assessment

The purpose of the chapter is to assist teachers to provide meaningful assessments that enable them to explain the results to learners, parents, and fellow educators and determine what learning activities are needed. Assessment is a complex term because it implies so many diverse ideas: tests, examinations, rubrics, grades, performance reports, and evaluations. Clearly, there is a need for teachers to clarify and determine which assessment approach fits the different learning goals that comprise the curriculum. The chapter opens with a challenge for readers to consider a variety of assessment metaphors based on current research and the views of different assessment specialists. The chapter then examines the different assessment approaches based on their contexts of the approach and also clarifies what each approach can and cannot provide. Selected response, constructed response, observations, interviews, authentic performances, projects, and portfolios are described in light of their contexts. The chapter ends with a reflection to determine a personal assessment metaphor.