First Year Teacher's Survival Guide: Ready-To-Use Strategies, Tools & Activities For Meeting The Challenges Of Each School Day (J-B Ed:Survival Guides)

This book has so much useful and insightful information that I will be referring to it for my whole teaching career. I wish it had been a required text for education classes. Many questions could have been answered and many unpleasant situations could have been avoided during substitute and student teaching.

It is right up there with Harry Wong productions!

This text is jam packed full of helpful hint and strategies to prepare for the world of teaching.I am a fifth year BED student and I have found this book very applicable to real life world of teaching. In my opinion I think this text should be taught in classes like theory and practice at university. I recommend this book to anyone pursuing teaching it is fabulous resource and well worth your money.

As a mentor of K-8 beginning teachers, I was looking for a book with implimentable, concrete ideas. This survival guide is largely a book of lists and general knowledge. It might be more applicable for high school teachers. If you are looking for materials to get your first year off to a solid start, I do recommend Harry and Rosemary Wong's book How to be an Effective Teacher: The First Days of School and their CD set How to Improve Student Achievement. I spent today reviewing First Year Teacher's Survival Guide... and How to Be An Effective Teacher... while listening to the CD set. The Wongs' materials will guide any teacher to becoming an effective teacher. The survival guide would be a 'nice to have'; the first days of school book is a 'must have'. I'm returning the survival guide.

I am going to teach at small private school and I have not gone through credential program; so I was desperately looking for a good book to fill me in for preparation of my first year.

The first thing to note is that this is more like a reference than a guide (at least in my opinion), and even the author mentioned to use this book as a reference, despite the big "survival guide" labeled on the book cover.

What's the difference between guide and reference? In this case, guide would be how to do specific task or skill, given some type of situation; think about tutor, or someone/thing that helps you to "walk through" issue. Reference is listing of information for specific or particular topic; think of dictionary or encyclopedia. Although there were sequence of topics, they didn't seem to be integraded enough to be used as a guide. Some of you might say guide & reference are the same thing or disagree with my view.

That being said, let's talk about some negative aspects. This is not a quick reading like the other book I've read Your First Year As a High School Teacher : Making the Transition from Total Novice to Successful Professional. There are way too many lists / bullet points, each having short as sentence or as long as a paragraph. Because of this format, it was little difficult to read through fluently. Another things is that the organization seem too "hectic" in a sense. There were boxes everywhere, which made my eyes wander around trying to read different boxes and quotes that are separate from the main reading.

Although these are negative, they are of minor significance.


I found this book to be more positive. Used as a reference book, it's a great book. It provides you with tons of information, different ideas and perspectives. Although there weren't too much of student activities, I found that there were many strategies and tools as stated. Each chapter (section) also contains some sort assessment of your knowledge, skill, or forms that you can actually use by copying or use as template to make your own customized version.

As for the content, it's rich in many information regarding skills you should acquire, behavior to perform as teacher, connection with students, delivering good instruction, evaluation, and dealing with possible problems with students, faculties, or stresses. And yes, it also talks about classroom management and handling student behavior issues, along with motivation.

It also provides you with lists of organizations, and fairly updated or recent URL to websites that was mentioned in the book.

It is fairly comprehensive. But I think they should publish two versions, one for primary and other for secondary school; some ideas & contents clearly are not appropriate for some grades levels.

One other quirky thing about this book is that it smells. I am not sure if it's the paper or ink (lots of blue colors), but I smell oil-ish smell, which is bit distracting. Maybe it's just by book fresh from the print.

Anyhow, I think first year teachers without much experiences would definitely benefit from this book.


PS - I highly recommend visiting ADPRIMA website: [...] The website provides you with great theory about lesson planning & extreme importance of creating proper objective which determines rest of the lesson plan; it was just what I was looking for and needed.

Purchased for a gift....Amazon made it easy and it's a wonderful guide for any starting teacher, lots of ideas!