There are several ways you can become a great teacher. You can check out our guide here to learn how to be a better teacher.
Teaching is never something you can completely master. Like any other great art form, it is constantly evolving and changing. Your own techniques and practices can be honed, changed, and progress with time.
There are many ways you can approach the challenge of improving your teaching abilities. Learning how to be a better teacher doesn’t have to be difficult and can even be an enjoyable task if looked at with the proper perspective.
What steps might you take to better aid those that need your assistance? Read on and we’ll walk you through what you need to know.
Don’t Be Afraid to Be Self-Reflective
Stubbornness never got anyone anywhere. You might feel fairly confident in your teaching abilities, but it’s important to recognize that there is no right and wrong when it comes to teaching at the end of the day. There’s always room for improvement.
The only way to find what these improvements might be is through an attitude of self-reflection.
The fact that you’re hearing reading this blog is already a good indication that you’re moving in the right direction. You’re taking steps to actively think about your teaching, not just moving through the day to day like a machine.
One way to push yourself to be productively self-reflective? Start a journal. All it will require is an extra ten minutes at the end of your teaching day. Pull it out and reflect on the day— what seemed to go well and what didn’t? What might be the reasons behind these various successes and failures?
If you can encourage yourself to think consciously about teaching in this way, you’ll be amazed at what ideas and solutions might naturally come to you.
Keeping a journal in this way will also give you a beautiful map of your progress that you can look back on should you ever go down the wrong path. It’ll also become its own personal memento for your teaching journey and one you can share with others in the educator community.
Find Relevancy In Your Lessons
Sometimes it can help a lot to meet your students halfway. What kinds of things do they care about? Everyone has interests, passions that you can use to your advantage as an engine for learning.
If you take the time to learn a bit about your students and their interests, you might find ways to make your lessons much more engaging. The more engaged and naturally interested your students are, the more they are likely to soak up.
A student who eagerly comes to meet the material halfway will be a student that takes this knowledge with them when they leave the classroom. This is even better than the student who might get an A grade but memorizes and then forgets the material.
Exactly how best to make your lessons interesting and relevant will depend both on the material you teach and who you are teaching it to. Some subjects and audiences will be easier to do this with than others.
An example: if you’re teaching history to young children, see if you can find any similar figures in pop culture or modern history that your kids have a natural affinity for. Linking these figures back to historical figures can help students see a humanity that they might struggle to find in the pages of a textbook.
Of course, you’ll need to make sure the relevance that you’re bringing doesn’t water down or dismantle the point of the original material. This can be a delicate balance but can reap huge rewards if you get it right.
Embrace Variety
As we’ve come to mention in this post, there is no one right way to teach. There are a variety of wonderful strategies and approaches that all that might yield a positive result.
Something to remember as you develop your own teaching style is that you don’t need to commit yourself solely to one method. In fact, introducing a sense of variety in your teaching style and approach actually might help your lessons to hit harder with your students.
Using different materials and approaches to get your points across can help cover your bases. A student who might not respond to one angle might see things more clearly from another.
What one might get from a textbook, the other might get from hands-on, interactive work. What might be clear to someone in a video might be more clear in a class discussion to another.
Embracing variety will help to cement these facts in students’ heads. You’ll be coming at them from different angles, reinforcing the things they need to know without being so strictly repetitive.
Some students might zone out if you were to repeat yourself outright. However, changing techniques gives them a reason to remain engaged and allows them to see the same material from a different perspective.
If you do take this methodology into your classroom, just remember to keep a handle on what through-line of your lesson is. Variety can be a great tool as long as it doesn’t obscure the main points that you’re attempting to drill into students’ minds.
Understanding How To Be a Better Teacher
Becoming a great instructor is something any educator wants to strive towards. Understanding how to be a better teacher might not always be easy, but the rewards of the process are well worth the trouble. The above are just a few possible directions one might choose to explore.
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