What Makes a Good Teacher?
Any time I think about my past life as a student I keep telling me that a good Teacher is more than a teacher, good Teachers love and take care of their students, they are not NUMBERS.
A good teacher is someone who loves supporting you and can understand you if you have difficulties...........................................
Thursday 16th October 2014
Yesterday I went to a teacher's refresher seminar organized by our local Language Group for English Teachers. The topic was Objective: LIFE LONG LEARNING through REFLECTIVE TEACHING AND LEARNER TRAINING. It was an interesting reflection made by a teacher who is working at university and shared ideas with us. We got back into our past life as students and we were asked what we liked and what we did not like when we were at school and were just learners. It was interesting to see how FEELINGS were so important. Professor ANILA S.Scott-Monkhouse of the UNIVERSITY of Parma made us think and I realized that once you get entrapped into the process of teaching and feel you are under pressure to cover the syllabus you do not Always think about your students in terms of people who are involved in your lessons.
She left us by using these words:
Before you say anything
Remember the educational importance of self-esteem.
I think that we should all rember that a good teacher does not destroy the self-image of the student, each student is different from the Others and each student is important. They learn little by little but we should encourage each person and tell them that they are important and they are the player of the lessons.
What makes a good Teacher?
A good teacher can deal with the problems of the students who are Special, Today we have a lot of students with Special Needs, disabled students and students with dyslexia.
SELF - DEVELOPMENT
What a good teacher can do in order to become a better teacher
- use blogs and social forums for teachers
- take part in conferences , webminars, special courses for teachers
- work on his/her self-development in terms of courses or special webminars that might enrich his / her teaching tools
- write a reflective diary
- meet other Teachers and share ideas with them about best practices and also difficulties
WORKING ON LINE......... FROM HOME.............................
My favourite web sites and the ones which I usually use for studying on line and Learning more about Language teaching in general:
- http://www.hltmag.co.uk/oct14/index.htm ( Humanising Language Teaching)
- http://www.cambridgeenglish.org/teaching-english/resources-for-teachers/webinars/
http://www.pearson.it/index.php
-http://grahamworkmanbili.wikispaces.com/CLIL+websites
-http://www.webenglishteacher.com/index.html
-http://www.classroom20.com/ ( to learn more about new Technologies and teaching )
- http://www.onestopenglish.com/
- http://www.ted.com/
- http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/
What I think............End of week 3
I have had good and bad
teachers in my school life. Referring to the film DEAD POET SOCIETY
I should say that the teacher of
the film is a good example of
someone who is a great
supporter for his students. He loves them and they love him
but at the beginning of the film they
may find him an unusual man and teacher.
Once they get to KNOW him and his approaches
they are involved and entrapped into his lessons and will discover the world of poetry. I had two great teachers in my school life :they
taught me Italian and History of
Art and I will never forget them because they
cared and made me love what they
were doing with us.
By quoting from W.A.Ward we could say " The great teacher inspires"(1) . Unfortunately in some cases our students have to face the coldness of their teachers, not always teachers can be people who inspire students, they may have difficulties in establishing a relationship and interact with them.
A good teacher is a person who changes gear when he/ she realizes that students do not always understand what he/she is trying to explain. Good teachers are able to make their teaching better by reflecting. Critical reflection should help teachers to approach teaching and learning in a different way.
Teaching is an on-going process and all good teachers should cope with the main achievements and difficulties and think more about the best teaching practices they should have.The classroom climate is also crucial for having better learners. "Outstanding teachers create an excellent classroom climate and achieve superior pupil progress largely by displaying more professional characteristics at higher levels of sophistication within a very structured learning environment. " (2)
(1) http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/good_teacher.html
References for self-development
- Towards Reflective Teaching by Jack C. Richards Department of English, City Polytechnic of Hong Kong http://www.tttjournal.co.uk/
- Reflective teaching-
The Principles and the Practices
ENGLISH TEACHING FORUM- October 2003
What do they think?
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