Literacy for Novice Educators: Podcast Reflection

 I am excited to announce that I flew solo on an episode of the New Teacher Talk. This was a great learning experience for me, since I never completed an episode on my own. I'm so glad that my first solo-podcast topic was one of my favorites... literacy. The essential question or main idea was what new educators should know about teaching reading. 

Pre-service and early educator friends... head over to listen! My goal is to make all teachers feel confident they can and will be successful at teaching reading. My target audience however is novice educators because I know how difficult it can be to not know where to start because that was me! It took me a long time teaching to realize that I did not learn all I needed to know in order to feel confident and be prepared to teach reading to my elementary students. It's hard to feel confident as a novice teacher when you probably only had one or two classes on "teaching reading" in college because that's clearly not enough! 

One of the most important things we can do as educators is to keep our learning journey alive and going. It's important that we continue to learn about what literacy is, what different strategies and programs that are available, and how to make decisions that are best for the students in our classrooms. Continuing your own learning journey about teaching reading is the first step to having your students succeed! Even if you are planning on teaching a specific subject such as math, you will still need to learn as much as you can about teaching reading because you will always have at least one student in your class that will struggle with reading.  

Be sure to network with others who can help you learn all you can! As I always say, find your people, form you pod! Stay current by joining groups online and don't be shy- network! We are our best resource, and it's important for us to support one another along our journey of learning. I also suggest in the podcast to keep an open mind. We want to be sponges and learn everything we can, and cautiously consider all the research. Remember it's research over theory friends! 

Lastly, think of yourself like your students' coach. You want to model for them, show them the strategies, and guide them along the way. Reading is not an implicit learning skill or spectator sport! We need to be actively involved in learning how to teach reading, so our students learn how to read. This is how we encourage grow their love to read!

Final Thoughts: Keep learning all you can about literacy. Keep networking with others about literacy to surround yourself with great minds! Keep giving yourself the grace and time you need to learn more about best practices for teaching reading. Keep being the coach your students need and they will learn to read and grow their love of reading! 

Here is the podcast information: https://newteachersguide.podbean.com


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