What Helped Me the Most During My First Year of Substitute Teaching

And a few things that I wish I had

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I am about to wrap up my first year of substitute teaching at our local middle school. It has been a very rewarding experience to spend time with middle schoolers in my community, but it has also been challenging since I have no teaching background.

These are the things that helped me the most during my first year of substitute teaching.

Seating charts

Seating charts are the #1 tool that helped me as a substitute because they have many helpful purposes.

First, it helps me learn the students’ names. I’m normally terrible at remembering names, but as a substitute, I meet 150+ students in a single day. I can only say “learner,” “student,” “sir,” “miss,” or “you in the red shirt” so many times.

Second, seating charts help the students get off on the right foot behavior-wise when a substitute teacher is in their classroom because it puts their bodies where they should be for learning.

The first thing students try to do when they get a new sub is to sit by their friends (or pretend to be another student or go by another name). They quickly give up when I pull out the seating chart and score a major point for making it…