Every teacher wants to excel in their field but sometimes lack the skills on how to be exemplary. Having attended a teaching course is not enough to make you shine; you have to work hard as a teacher to make yourself stand out from the rest.
Practicing the following skills can help in making you the best;
- Set goals and evaluate performance- List down your goals for each school year and evaluate your performance after the school year ends. Look at what activities you did which worked better and for those that didn’t work; think of other ways of improving and making them better.
Review your skills, the teaching style you used and come up with ways to which you want to move forward.
- Have Assessment tools- If you are starting a tear or curriculum, use this chance to create assessment tools. The holidays offer a great time to come up with these. It is not necessarily that you spent a whole year, create an overview of a term and come up with an in-depth assessment.
- Understand your school methods of evaluation- Understand the tools that your school uses to evaluate teachers. Know what it takes to excel as a teacher in that particular class.
- Meet with other teachers– Always spend time with fellow teachers either from your school or teachers from other schools. By interacting with fellow teachers, you learn a lot from each other, exchange ideas, experiences and even get to know different methods of teaching used by other teachers that have worked best.
- Practice active learning methods- several students don’t stay focused in an entire lesson; this makes them understand very little of what has is taught. Use techniques to make your lessons more fun at the same time engage the students more. Active learning can be practiced through the use of various activities in your experiences. Have them do group work, this helps in maintaining the students’ attention and can solve more difficult assignments easily than as individuals.
Use of group works addresses objectives like; recalling what they have learned in the lesson, making them ask and respond to questions, and summarizing the most critical points in a specific experience.
- Have objectives for each lesson and note them down- Always have observable actions which your students can perform if they understood the content you just taught. More specific goals will help your students grasp essential materials better.
- Organize your time– Have your own schedule of doing things for this saves time. Dedicate time to do specific tasks within the week, for example preparing for student group works, time answering the students’ questions on topics which they didn’t understand well.
- Be resourceful– Read a lot and learn from others. Ask them about their experiences, the approaches they use in their classes and also some of the activities they have done which they think worked better for particular lessons. Ask about books they have read which were more useful or some courses that assisted them to succeed.
Final thoughts
Analyze your work and come up with better strategies to make you an exemplary teacher in all aspects. It is also important to get opinions from your students; this helps in evaluating your quality of teaching and provide insights on what needs to be improved.
