The life of a teacher is not always easy and it is important that throughout your career, you are always seeking to improve how well you teach your students. In light of this we spoke to the great James Padlock, to offer you some advice on how you can improve your teaching skills. The problem very often is that once you have graduated, you go into teach full of life and innovation, over the years the school can wear you down, and you begin to teach on auto-pilot. Naturally when you do this you aren’t giving your students the best education, so here are some tips on ensuring that you are.
Watching Others
If you have any spare days or free lessons, it will be important that you try and watch how others teach, in order to learn from their styles. If you have a center board at school with all of the lessons on there, pick when you are free and then ask the teacher if you can sit in on their class. You should make sure that you pick old and new teachers here, watch how they teach, watch their style, and borrow parts that you like.
Seeking Feedback
Seeking feedback is something which we don’t all enjoy doing, especially if we are going to get negativity. Last year I spent some time on the lake with the school kids and a couple of other teachers, so I took the opportunity to have a chat with my peers, to find out what they thought that my strengths and weaknesses were. In truth they gave me some great news in terms of my strengths, and they discussed my weaknesses in a constructive manner. As long as you know someone who can give you some balanced opinions, you can really learn and improve from feedback.
Looking at the Facts
One thing which is great about being a teacher is that we can be quite easily measured by the results of our students. Sometimes this can be a little convoluted if there is more than one teacher teaching the same student the same subject, but this is not too common. With this in mind then, you should be judging yourself based on what kind of results your students are getting, both in the class and in larger exams. If the results aren’t where you want them to be, you must address this and ask yourself why, and what you can do better.
Online Research
There are some great creative minds out there who are constantly seeking ways to be a better teacher and improving practices which can help the kids. If you have found yourself stuck in a rut in terms of your teaching, why not investigate online and see if there are some new and exciting techniques which you could try, in order to improve your teaching and ultimately help your students more.
