Nurturing your teaching skills can be quite a rewarding experience. It captures students’ attention and keeps them receptive, interactive and engaged. You can magically turn boring topics into lively and engaging sessions with the right teaching skills. If you explain your lessons in a way that motivates and inspires your students, passing tests will become the norm, and they will be motivated to learn.
What are the ways to polish your teaching skills?
Identify lesson goals
Write down the observable activities you want students to do by the end of the class. The action should be directly observablcollaborative learninge. Keeping lesson goals in mind is a best practice to facilitate framing activities and assessments inside and outside the classroom. If your students are clear about what they want, they will rise to meet your expectations.
Encourage collaborative learning
Divide students into teams. Each team member should have direct interaction, active interdependence, and individual accountability. Research shows that students engaged in collaborative learning environments tend to be more analytical, innovative, and creative and have a better understanding of the material being studied than those taught traditionally.
Talk with students about their learning difficulties
In a class, there will always be advanced and underprepared students. What they have in common is that each category faces some learning challenges. Asking questions about learning difficulties is the first step in developing teaching methods that appeal to everyone. Ask them about their weaknesses and strengths, but always remember to keep this information confidential. You can then provide supplemental learning materials.
Interact with other teachers
Spend time interacting with fellow teachers; they may be teachers from your school or other schools. You never know what they have to offer. Grab every opportunity and interact with them. Some may have more teaching experience than you and might give you invaluable tips on how to improve your teaching skills. If you get an opportunity, attend teachers’ seminars.
Self-assessment of your performance
After the academic year ends, pause to reflect on all that happened. Have you achieved your yearly objectives? Is there anything you could have done better? Did your students find your teaching approach to be effective? What was successful, and what wasn’t? By asking yourself these questions, you can assess and improve your teaching approach for the upcoming school year.
Use of portfolios
A portfolio can be a valuable tool for evaluating learning outcomes. A variety of strategies for assessing student progress and the effectiveness of teaching methods are used, including student-generated questions, opinion polls, audio tapes, concept maps, knowledge checklists, and minute papers.
Join Professional Development Programs
Attending high-quality professional development and reflective practice is essential to a teacher’s professional life. Professional development programs are intended to support teachers to become confident, responsible, reflective, innovative and engaged.
Exeed College offers a full range of teacher education programs designed to meet the needs and experiences of educators.
Having the privilege of teaching is a special calling. There are not many professionals who have the privilege of molding future generations. Educators are powerful not only because they can teach but because they can inspire and motivate students. The tips above can help you improve your teaching skills and ensure your students are better prepared for the future.
