I remember how it felt to be a first year teacher. It was a bit like being tossed out of a cruise ship into the deep ocean with nothing more than a flimsy life preserver to keep me afloat.

Some of my education classes in college had Elementary Ed majors and I noticed that they appeared to be more prepared for the classroom than us Secondary Ed majors. This is because while Elementary Ed focuses on classroom management and teaching strategies, Secondary Ed simply focuses on your subject area.

This meant when I graduated with my teaching degree I was way more qualified to hold an intellectual conversation on classical works of literature than I was to actually teach it. And I was even less prepared to teach grammar and writing than I was literature.

Large school districts tend to have strong departments in which multiple teachers teach the same class and they share plans and resources. This is extremely beneficial to new teachers. But, what if this does not describe your teaching situation? How are you supposed to actually teach a high school class?

Teaching is very individualistic, just as learning is. Finding your rhythm in the classroom will take trial and error, and that is okay…I promise. When you fail, admit your mistake to your students and move on. They will respect you for it, and it teaches them to not be afraid to experiment with new things.

After trying different teaching strategies, I have found what works best for me is putting together a PowerPoint Presentation with the concepts I want to teach and providing students with guided notes to follow along with. The PowerPoint gives visual learners something to look at. I read through the presentation, engaging the auditory learners. The fill-in-the-blank guided notes appeals to the kinesthetic learners and serves double duty by keeping the entire class on task.

Setting up this type of system is admittedly a lot of work the first year. But after that, you will simply pull the PowerPoint and guided notes again and again each year that you teach. What I do is go through Lit Charts to keep me on track chapter by chapter as I create the PowerPoint. Once it is complete, I open a word file, copy the entire presentation contents in to it, then meticulously go through replacing important words with blanks.

I am currently working on cleaning up all of my PowerPoints with guided notes and putting them on Teachers Pay Teachers for other educators to use. One of my best examples of having a PowerPoint Lesson with fill-in-the-blank guided notes is my Globe Theater lesson.