Becoming the best in your field isn’t easy, especially if you are a teacher. To be a good teacher, you need to be patient, creative, motivated, passionate, confident and organised. As well as possessing many skills and abilities, great teachers will be highly educated and will never stop learning. As well as thriving in their career, teachers need to worry about the performance and happiness of their class. This makes teaching an extremely complex career choice. If you want to progress within your field, here are 8 ways you can grow your teaching career.
Evolve Your Teaching
In five to fifteen years time, your teaching methods should not be the same as they are today. The way children, teenagers, and young adults learn is constantly changing. This is mainly due to the rapid speed at which technology is being created and implemented in modern-day classrooms. To keep up with the moving times, you should look for small and simple ways to improve and evolve your teaching methods. When things change rapidly, they are more likely to fail, so you should introduce new tactics slowly and steadily. Student feedback can be a great way to see what you did and did not do well.
Continue Your Education
Growth doesn’t happen overnight and it is something that you will need to continue to work towards as a teacher. Furthering your education by joining workshops, seminars, or getting more qualifications, will give you inspiration for new ideas and will allow you to evolve your teaching methods to suit certain age groups, genders, and abilities. If you want to further your education by studying for a master’s, an online master’s in education UK at the University of Exeter can be studied at home around your usual hectic schedule while providing you with the opportunity to enhance your teaching abilities.
Start Evaluating Yourself
Student feedback evaluations can get to teachers. It gives pupils the chance to express how they feel, so harsh comments that create stress and doubt are to be expected, but it doesn’t mean that they don’t hurt. To help you remove any negativity from your mind, you should start evaluating yourself. Self-evaluation gives you the chance to examine your strengths. If you are unsure what they may be, then try to search for the positive comments when you read through your student feedback. By doing so, you will be able to point out or get reassurance that you are a good teacher and have many skills.
Set Teaching Themes
For most teachers, there will be a theme that runs through their teaching methods. Looking at the objectives of your course and thinking about ways the objective could be incorporated into your theme will help you to grow your teaching career. Tying everything into an overall theme will benefit your students more than teaching things in discrete parts that will appear disconnected from other areas of your syllabus. Every movie scene and chapter in a book will be unique, but they will come together to create something very enjoyable. Don’t worry, the theme doesn’t have to be that grand.
Time Your Changes
Timing is everything and you need to make sure you time things correctly to grow as an educator. When things suddenly change for a student, it can reduce their attention span and learning capabilities for some time. If you want to test any new ideas, you should wait until a new term to try them out. This will be less disruptive to your classroom and will allow you to evaluate the pros and cons of the change effectively. If things don’t go too well, it is acceptable to slowly adapt your methods to improve your students’ experience. It is good to tell your class about any changes and listen to their opinions.
Expect Potential Struggles
The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear that life isn’t always easy and things can change drastically almost overnight. Even though some problems are difficult to predict, there are other student struggles that you can identify before they become a major issue. This could be anything from noticing consistent mistakes in homework tasks to difficulty when trying to grasp complicated concepts. When you think ahead, it will give you a chance to smoothly assess the struggle and treat it as a growth opportunity instead of a drawback. You can also use this information to adapt your teaching methods.
Don’t Work Alone
Teachers spend a lot of their time around children or young adults and many of them can improve their performance by communicating with adults in the same field. It is important to remember that power exists in numbers and it is good to speak to your colleagues for tips and advice on how to improve your content and deliver instructions. To gain benefit from this point, you should bring together a group of peers who you get along with and are open to sharing their ideas. It doesn’t matter what content area they specialise in. Asking for feedback and reflecting on your own teaching is useful.
Always Be Positive
Remaining positive is essential for your own happiness and everyone around you. It can be hard to be positive and upbeat all the time, but if you focus on becoming the positive solution, you and your students will benefit from that. The best way to stop being negative is to avoid putting yourself in situations that make you feel uncomfortable or unhappy. This can be easier said than done, but it is highly advisable. For example, if your colleagues in the teacher’s lounge are moaning about their class, then you should stay away. Turning everything into a positive event is great for your mind and soul.
Following these steps will allow you to improve as a teacher while growing your teaching career. No two days are the same as a teacher, and the job can feel overwhelming at times. Improvements will require research and trial and error, but once you find a method that works for you and your students, you will all thrive.
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