Uncommon Sense for New Teachers

Ryan Donlan lives life where passion and purpose connect, serving as a lifelong teacher equipping professional educators, human service professionals, and organizational leaders with the skills necessarily to impact positively the lives of others. He serves as Professor of Educational Leadership at Indiana State University, travels extensively with his training, speaking, and authoring, and is most aptly defined as a humble and proud husband and father, with wife Wendy, son Sean, and daughter Katelyn, who keep him grounded and focused on his next day’s best service, to others and self.

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction

Unit 1: Your Choice of Teaching

1 A “Thank You” in Advance

2 Career Shopping

3 The New Way “You Matter”

4 Extra-Curricular Horsepower: Never-Growing-Up or Always-the-Adult

5 Your Teaching Life

Unit 2: Your Professional Preparation

6 Building Competence and Confidence

7 Things to Borrow; Things to Not

8 Student Brain Surgery

9 Special Education for All Educators

10 Finding the Pearl

Unit 3: Your Classroom

11 Your Domain; Your Show

12 Purpose, Protocol, and Predictability

13 Daily Dignity through Interaction Safety

14 Environmental Gifts for Students

15 Room Décor and Appeal: A Gathering Place

Unit 4: Your Teaching

16 Talent Scouting and Cast Management

17 Differentiated Instruction, Defined

18 Delightfully Different Differentiation

19 Maintaining Classroom Control and Order

20 Organizational Effectiveness through Student Responsibility

Unit 5: Your Students

21 What Students Are Not

22 Who Students Are

23 The Name Game

24 Bringing Their Best Self

25 Discipline as a Teachable Moment

Unit 6: Your Difference Making

26 All Other Duties As Assigned

27 What’s Really Going On

28 The Secret Solution

29 Elder-like Etiquette

30 Doing Difference Differently

Unit 7: Your Workload

31 Work/Life Imbalance

32 The Urgent, the Important, the Both, and the Neither

33 Many Hands Make Light Work

34 Avoiding the Guilt Trip

35 Being Self-ful

Unit 8: Your Colleagues

36 Cast of Characters

37 When Your Mentor Is Assigned

38 Ways to Coteach Ways to Not

39 When Colleagues Resist New Things

40 Work Friends

Unit 9: Your Superpowers

41 Hero Making for Parents

42 First-Exchange Theory: The Power of the Greeting

43 Thinking on the Fly When Something Needs to Change

44 The Gift of Profanity: Reading Between the F’s

45 Favoring Favorable Feedback

Unit 10: By Special Request

46 Classroom Behavioral Management

47 Relationship Building

48 Lesson Plans that Check All the Boxes

49 Driving School Data: From A to Z

50 From Tools to Techniques

Unit 11: Your Unfinished Business

51 Going Back to School

52 Starting Over, Undefeated

Conclusion

About the Author