Every Beginning Is Difficult

Quite a few new teachers get employed at our school each year. Since working with children with special is a challenge, the new employees need to be adequately introduced to the educational process. First they need to get acquainted with the organization of our institution and special needs of the children they will be teaching. Because different organizational challenges appear during the educational process (activity days, calling assistance, team meetings, working on individual programmes), I compiled a folder where all the documents are gathered in one place. During the first interview I discuss all the documents with a new employee. Each teacher gets a mentor who monitors and observes him for three months, and is available for questions or to talk. When I am a mentor, I also do teaching observations in class. I observe the teacher's work and at the end we analyse the lesson. I prepared a special form for lesson analysis, the purpose of which is to guide the teacher towards certain realisations about his teaching style. Finally, I carry out a lesson in class and the teacher is an observer. What follows is another analysis with the help of the observation form. I also prepared a box of materials which help the teacher with his work. It includes: a school diary, schedules, rules, behaviour management system and teaching games. All described approaches are carried out in order to make the new teacher's introduction into our team easier.