These tips will keep you in good stead when dealing with colleagues as well as your students:
Behaving professionally with colleagues:
- Clean the board when you finish
- If you rearrange the furniture, return the room to the state you found it in
- Return borrowed materials
- Start and finish lessons on time
- Make sure you know how to use the machinery. Try not to break it & if the worst does happen, report it.
Improve your Attitude in the Classroom:
- Smile – it shows a friendly attitude and warms the students to you.
- Respond to what students say as communication – respond naturally and show interest in what they say
- Find out about students, get to know them; address them by name.
- Take time, show interest in both the learning & the personal interests of the students. Talk to them before and after the lesson. Notice if they are absent.
- Try to enjoy their company as a group
- Show them that you are enjoying teaching them
Use eye contact to manage the class:
- To ensure students have understood what they are supposed to do & know what is going on
- To indicate who is to speak
- To encourage ideas during eliciting ideas / responses
- To show a student who is talking that you are taking notice
- To keep in touch with students – especially those whom you are not dealing with at that time
- To stop, to hurry up or to signal an activity like pair work
- To check everyone is participating
Use students’ names:
- Helps to establish rapport; it creates a friendly cooperative atmosphere
- Shows you are interested in them as people
- Makes possible to discuss students with colleagues / superiors
How to learn names:
- Get students to introduce each other and go around the class in random order, saying their names aloud to check if you remember
- Keep a register and call out if needed to learn names
- Associate names with physical features
- Use names consciously in the first few lessons
- Finally, if you can’t remember a name, admit it and ask!
How to make instructions effective
- Use simple language & short expressions
- Be consistent
- Use visual or written clues
- Demonstrate
- Break the instructions down
- Target your instructions
- Be decisive and use words as signals, like Right / Listen etc.
Why are pair work & group work useful?
- Gives students more valuable talk time for practice, especially language
- Allows you to withdraw and monitor individual performances
- Encourages rapport between students
- Increases cooperation and independent of teacher
- Gives opportunity for shy / unconfident students to participate
- Provides change in pace
- Adds variety to a lesson
How to monitor Group Work
- Stand back
- Quickly check
- Don’t interrupt unless there is a real need
- Spread your attention
- Be easily accessible
- Feed in ideas only if needed
- Provide encouragement & be positive
- Give correction and / or gather data for feedback
How to establish rapport and maintain discipline
- Have the right style that suits your personality
- Don’t prejudge a class
- Enjoy your job / look as if you enjoy your job
- Be positive about the activities and materials you are using
- Show personal interest in students
- Personalize materials and activities
- Respond and react to what students say
- Be interested in their progress
- Ask for comments on the class
How to gain respect from your student
- Be punctual
- Be well prepared for the lesson
- Return homework promptly
- Do what you say you are going to do
- Treat students & people consistently and fairly
- Try not to let your personal feelings about individual students influence the way you treat them as members of the group
- Don’t ignore their problems
- Never make threats you are never able or prepared to carry out
- Never lose your temper
How can you encourage students to write?
Have a positive & cooperative attitude towards writing: encourage real writing tasks; plan sufficient writing tasks; encourage peer discussion & advice; give encouraging feedback; be selective about the mistakes you are going to mark so that you don’t have to mark every single mistake made; display finished tasks in a class file / wall
Prepare students for writing: brainstorm / help gather ideas; talk about layouts
Structure writing tasks: plan writing activities carefully so that there is controlled/ guided / free writing; provide clear models; monitor carefully; show that you think neat, accurate writing is important.
Plan guided and freer practice carefully.
Guidelines for a process writing activity:
Introduction – stimulate interest through a listening / reading text / speaking activity such as role play, visuals etc. Create a situation where a piece of writing is required. Discuss text type – letter / poster / essay / report etc. Think about reader(s). Who are they? What will interest them? What do they need to know?
Working with ideas – get ideas from students through brainstorming / using word pools / word clouds / mind maps etc. Note down ideas. Develop the ideas. Choose those ideas to keep and those to be rejected. Order the ideas.
Planning – remind students of format of text types.
Drafting – encourage them to write drafts in pairs.
Reviewing / editing – students correct and improve their first draft. They look at content, language, accuracy, organization, style etc. At this stage you can take the work in and make comments.
Re-writing – students write out the final version and submit to the teacher for checking & assessment.
