I asked Associate Professor Dawan Coombs how new teachers can create meaningful, authentic experiences for their students while they navigate leading a classroom for the first time. Here's what she had to say.
Throughout high school, I loved English. On my mission, I learned to love teaching, so majoring in English teaching at BYU was a natural decision for me. However, when I arrived at my first class of the major, I felt very out of place. My reasons for wanting to teach did not match anyone else’s, and I did not feel qualified as a somewhat timid student.
What I didn’t know is that many first-time teachers also have a difficult time acclimating to their new roles in the classroom. Associate Professor Dawan Coombs (Adolescent Literacy and Struggling Readers) experienced this nerve-wracking transition firsthand and now conducts research aimed at helping both preservice and practicing English teachers maintain their excitement for the profession, despite difficulties they may face.
Book One: New Teacher Development
In her book Two Years in the Lives of Two English Teachers: To Be, To Do, To Become, Coombs and her coauthors discuss the difficulties first-time teachers often experience. New teachers struggle, in part, because they are still navigating the nuances of establishing their teacher identities.
However, Coombs and her colleagues propose that the very process of working through these difficulties is central to developing a teacher identity. For example, many new teachers may struggle to know how to intervene when a student is distracting a fellow student instead of reading. Coombs and her coauthors advise new teachers to adopt habits of reflection and dialogue to better understand and help students who need extra support. To build a teacher identity, Coombs and her coauthors also recommend that new teachers leverage their other identities and strengths as they cultivate their teaching skills
Book Two: Actively Engaging with Texts
New teachers also have to learn to make their class engaging and authentic for all students. This can feel overwhelming to teachers at all levels of experience. Aware of the apprehension, Coombs outlines several ways to make reading and literature exploration engaging in her book Teaching Reading and Literature with Classroom Talk.
One strategy involves using artifacts, or physical objects, to “make symbols more concrete and help students find relevance in the things that they’re doing.” For example, in one of my college classes, my professor asked us to bring in an object that we couldn’t bear to throw away. This led to a discussion on how objects hold memories and, ultimately, what we, as individuals, value the most. Similarly, middle and high school students can use objects to explore symbols, characters, and events in texts.
Coombs also recommends having students experiment with elements of drama—different sounds, emotions, and even personalities—to make sense of texts. Attending to these elements in stories or poems helps students understand tone, characterization, and imagery. By doing so, she says, “You’re forcing kids to think through other perspectives, or you’re helping them realize, ‘I haven’t had that experience, but I could see, if this was my life situation, this would be a really big struggle.’”
Teachers can also create simulations to help students engage in out-of-the-box thinking that promotes reading comprehension. To illustrate, Coombs says, “Students get firsthand experiences with conflicts such as ‘the individual verses society’ in a simulated witch hunt where students try to identify who among them is really trustworthy.”
Coombs explains that these strategies bring a fun dynamic to learning, but teachers must pair activities with meaningful reading and reflection to be impactful. “You’re not just going to do the simulation,” Coombs says, “you’re going to have a class discussion about the students’ feelings, how they reacted, what they saw happening, and what issues” the simulation highlights. When that reflection helps students draw connections to the text and dialogue about the reading, they become more engaged and more willing to learn.
Teachers can learn more about these techniques in Coombs’s book—and hopefully find excitement, encouragement, and instruction as they navigate the uncertainty, nerves, and learning curves that come with teaching for the first time. Moreover, Coombs shows teaching as an ongoing dialogue, and that concept reassures new teachers like me that growth never stops.
Find Coombs’s books here.