If you are already a teacher, and you are wondering what you can do to improve your skills and abilities in that job, then there are plenty of things you can focus on in order to do so. Being a better teacher is very often about ensuring that you can focus on it in the right way, and have some kind of a good idea about what you are going to try and help your pupils to do. As it turns out, this is one of those jobs where you suddenly find after a while that your sphere of influence is much greater than you had originally thought – and that, in fact, you can expect to use your teaching as an opportunity to pave the way for a much better future for all. Let’s take a look at some of the first steps you might want to take in order to make sure that you can do that one day.
Developing Patience
If there is anything which is going to be hugely important in your teaching, it is the ability to be patient. As long as you can do that, you will find it much easier to teach children, and in particular younger children who are often considerably more difficult to keep control of in this sense. By developing some patience ,you will make your job easier for yourself, and it will be much less likely to cause you any real stress, so it is something to think about. The only real way to develop this kind of patience in the long term is to practice it on the job, so make sure that you are doing that if you want to really get it going. After a while you will find that you are automatically and quite naturally developing a real patience, although there are probably still going to be times when you start to lose your patience again. As long as you are focused on it, however, you will surely and little by little be able to keep it going in the right direction, and that is the main thing.
Teaching Equally For All
It might well be that you will have people in your class of different levels of ability and perhaps even some extreme cases who need a lot more help or attention. Part of the challenges of teaching is ensuring that all children are getting the right amount of help they need, and that they are going to be able to learn to the best of their abilities. You might even find that you need some special training along the way to help with some more difficult cases, and fortunately there is plenty such training to be found. You might be signed up for some through your school anyway – but if not, you can consider something like the University of Redlands MALT course to keep you in the know on such concerns. As long as you are ensuring that you re teaching equally for all of your pupils, you are doing what you need to be doing in your role much more effectively, so this is something you don’t want to overlook if you can help it.
Being Prepared
Something that always surprises teachers when they are new into their role is just how much work they have to do outside of the classroom. Preparing for lessons, marking work and planning out future lesson plans are all going to take up time, but they are all necessary if you are going to be the best teacher you can be. If you fail to prepare, then you will find that you are not nearly so effective in ensuring that you are teaching in the right way, so this is something that you might want to think about. The more prepared you are, in general, the more of an ability you will have to be a good teacher, so this is one of the biggest concerns which you should be focusing on as a teacher. Over time you will learn methods for preparation which work well for you, but until then just try and do whatever you can to prepare as well as possible for each session.
As long as you pay attention to the above factors, you should find that you can be a much better teacher. What’s more, you should be able to make those changes in no time, meaning that you will be able to improve your teaching fast.
