Top Tips for Teachers in the New Year: What I Wish I’d Known Before I Started Teaching

Teacher engaging with students in a lively group discussion, fostering a positive start to the new academic year.

Joseph Tyler (Doctoral Researcher)

Top Tips for Teachers in the New Year Introduction:

A New Year Is a Design Opportunity

As a new year begins, teachers are often encouraged to “try something new”. New strategies. New tools. New initiatives. Yet after more than two decades in education, I’ve come to believe that improvement in teaching rarely comes from novelty. It comes from clarity.

Many of us have, at some point, mistaken student silence for understanding, correct answers for secure learning, or engagement for progress. We plan lessons carefully, deliver content diligently, and feel reassured when some students succeed. But the more uncomfortable question is this: what about the students who don’t?

This article brings together lessons drawn from long-term classroom experience, educational research, student feedback, and conversations with colleagues. The golden thread running through all of them is simple but demanding: effective teaching is not about what we cover, but about what learners actually learn. When learning fails, the place to look first is not student ability, but instructional design. What follows are the core principles I wish I had understood earlier, and which I believe matter most as we step into a new year of teaching.

1. Be Ruthlessly Clear About What You Want Students to Learn

One of the most significant shifts in my own practice came when I stopped asking, What am I teaching today? and started asking, What do I want students to leave knowing, understanding, or being able to do?

This distinction matters. Lessons that lack clarity often feel busy but achieve little. In contrast, when learning goals are explicit, students are better able to organise new information, monitor their own understanding, and make sense of feedback.

Research strongly supports this. Schema theory shows that learning is cumulative: new knowledge is understood by being connected to what learners already know (Bartlett, 1932). If we are unclear about the learning intention, we make those connections harder to form. Similarly, cognitive load theory reminds us that working memory is limited; unnecessary tasks, distractions, or poorly sequenced content can overwhelm learners and obscure the core idea (Sweller, 1988).

In practical terms, clarity means stripping lessons back to their conceptual essence. If an activity does not serve the learning goal, it is a distraction, no matter how engaging it appears.

2. Teach Through Difference, Not Just Definition

A common instructional error is assuming that giving a definition is enough. In reality, students understand concepts by recognising boundaries: what something is and what it is not.

Engelmann and Carnine argue that concept formation depends on carefully chosen examples and non-examples. Showing only positive cases invites overgeneralisation. Students may repeat definitions accurately while holding fragile or incorrect understanding beneath the surface pasted.

For example, students may define democracy as “rule by the people” yet struggle to distinguish it from other systems unless contrasts are explicitly taught. Learning happens at the edges of concepts, not at their centre.

A useful New Year habit, then, is to audit your examples. Ask: What unintended messages might these examples be sending? Precision here is not pedantry; it is equity.

3. Build Foundations Before You Demand Performance

Another lesson learned the hard way is this: complex performance always rests on simpler component knowledge. When students struggle with extended tasks, the problem is often not motivation or effort, but missing foundations.

Too often, we rush to the “main task”, the essay, the problem-solving activity, the discussion without checking whether students possess the prerequisite skills required to succeed. Stronger students compensate; weaker students accumulate confusion.

Effective teaching sequences learning carefully. It diagnoses starting points, secures foundations, and only then increases complexity. This is not about lowering expectations, but about sequencing them logically. When failure is predictable, it is usually instructional, not individual.

4. Design Examples With Care: Everything You Show Teaches Something

Every example teaches more than we intend. If multiple features vary at once, students may attend to the wrong attribute and form incorrect generalisations. This is particularly damaging for learners with fewer cognitive resources, who are less able to filter competing signals.

Effective examples control variables deliberately. If you are teaching colour, keep shape constant. If you are teaching structure, keep content stable. This level of care is not “spoon-feeding”; it is respectful design.

As Engelmann and Carnine argue, when instruction is well designed, errors are rare. When errors are widespread, they reveal a design problem pasted.

5. Relationships Matter, But They Are Not a Substitute for Design

Student feedback over the years has been remarkably consistent. Learners value clarity, fairness, and teachers who explain the why behind what they are doing. They also value feeling safe, respected, and listened to.

However, positive relationships alone do not guarantee learning. Rapport creates the conditions for learning, but it does not replace clear explanations, careful sequencing, or well-designed practice. The most effective classrooms combine warmth with precision.

Colleagues repeatedly emphasise the same point: small, consistent practices, such as explicitly stating lesson goals, revisiting prior learning, and ending sessions with reflection, create coherence over time. These routines reduce anxiety, support memory, and signal that learning is the priority.

Conclusion: Designing Teaching That Works for All

As we begin a new year, it is worth remembering that teaching is not neutral. How we design instruction determines who succeeds and who struggles. If our teaching only works for the strongest students, then it is not simply ineffective; it is inequitable.

The most important New Year resolution for teachers, then, is not to work harder or innovate faster, but to design more carefully. To be precise where it matters. To diagnose before judging. And to take responsibility for the outcomes our instruction produces.

Educational failure is rarely mysterious. More often, it is designed, unintentionally, but predictably. These, then, are my Top Tips for Teachers in the New Year: what I wish I’d known before I started teaching. They are not about novelty or quick wins, but about the quiet, disciplined work of designing learning that works for all students.

The good news is that anything designed can be redesigned. And that is where professional hope lies.

Reference List (Harvard style)

Bartlett, F.C. (1932) Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Engelmann, S. and Carnine, D. (2016) Theory of Instruction: Principles and Applications. Eugene, OR: National Institute for Direct Instruction.

Hendrick, C. (2023) 10 Rules for Designing Effective Learning.

Sweller, J. (1988) ‘Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning’, Cognitive Science, 12(2), pp. 257–285.