How To Be A Good Teacher

HOW TO BE A GOOD TEACHER

      A.    Definition of a good teacher

 A good teacher knows her students on many levels. She learns all she can about their academic strengths and needs, but even more about their interests, fears, hopes, and worries. She helps her students learn these things about themselves. She helps her students to learn some of these things about each other, especially the strengths and hopes.

B.     The Qualities and Characteristics of a Good Teacher

1. Good teachers treat their students with respect
2. Good teachers are honest
3. Good teachers give their students a lot of choice in their assignments
4. Good teachers have creative ways of presenting class
5. Good teachers get to know their students individually
6. Good teachers stand up for their students 
7. Good teachers don't give much or any homework

C.    What makes a good teacher?

A simple answer to the question “ What makes a good teacher?”  therefore, is that good teacher care more about their students’ learning than they do about their own teaching. There are many students’ responses about the question above as follows :

1.      They should make their lessons interesting so that you don’t fall asleep in them.

2.      A teacher should love her job. If she really enjoys it, that’ll make the lessons more     interesting.

Teachers who look fed up or unhappy with what they are doing tend to have a negative effect on their student. 

3.       I like the teacher who has his own personality and doesn’t hide it from the students so that he is not only a teacher but a person as well- and it comes through the lessons.

The ones who share their personality with their classes often have better result than those who don’t.

4.       I like teachers whose has lots of knowledge, not only of his subject.

Teacher should not be afraid to bring their own interests and lives in to the classroom (within reason, of course).

5.       A good teacher is an entertainer because can make a positive sense not a negative sense.

Between entertainment and teaching/learning should be balance.

6.       It is important that you can talk to the teacher when you have problems and you don’t get along with the subject.

Teacher must be approachable.

7.       A good teacher is … somebody who has an affinity with the students they are teaching.

Successful teachers are those people who can identify with the hopes, aspirations and difficulties of their students while they are teaching them.

8.       A good teacher should try and draw out the quiet and control the more talkative ones.

Experienced teachers can tell you of classes which are dominated by bright, witty, loud, extrovert students.

9.       She should be able to correct people without offending them.

Explaining to students that they have made a mistake is one of the most perilous encounters in the classroom. It has to be done with tact.

10.   A good teacher is … someone who helps rather than shouts.

Learning how to manage students and how to control boisterous classes is one of the fundamental skills of teaching.

11.   A good teacher is … someone who knows our names.

Teacher should know students’ characteristics.

D.     How should teachers talk to students?

The teachers have some ways to interact with their students as follows:

1.      A teacher should speak very slowly and clearly to their foreign-language students.

Because of English course is difficult to understand, teacher should speak clearly.

2.      Teachers should always use well-constructed sentences when they speak to their students.

Teachers are a leader in the classroom so they should give good example to their students.

3.      Teachers should speak to their students like parents talk to their young children.

Teachers should talk to their student slowly like parents talk to their young children because teachers are parents in school.

4.      Teachers should speak normally to their students-as if they were talking to their own friends.

Teachers have double character. Teachers must be guidance and friend to their students when they have problems.

5.      Teachers should only say things to students which the students will understand totally.

Teachers should convey course clearly and using easy words to understand their student. Teacher gives occasion to their student to ask when they not understand yet.

E.     How should teachers give instructions?

This issue of how to talk to students becomes crucial when teachers are giving their students intructions. There are two general rules for giving instruction: they must be kept as simple as possible, and they must be logical. Perhaps the most important point that determines how successfully students will learn is the way instructions are formulated and sometimes this point which distinguishes good teacher from bad ones. It is important, therefore, that teachers directions relating to academic activity and behavior are clear, precise, and affective. It goes without saying that the best activity in the world will turn into a disappointing failure if student don’t understand the instructions.  Before giving instructions, asking the followings:

a.     What is the information I am trying to convey?

b.    What must the students know if they are to complete the activity successfully?

c.     Which information do they need first?

d.    Which should come next?

To check that the students have understood can be achieved either by asking a student to explain the activity after the teacher has given the instruction or by getting someone to show the other people in the class how the exercise works.

F.     Who should talk in class?

A vital part of a teacher’s job is using the language they are learning. Students are the people who need the practice, in order words, not teacher. In general terms, therefore, a good teacher maximizes STT (Student Talking Time) and minimizes TTT (Teacher Talking Time).

     Good TTT may have beneficial qualities, however. If teachers know how to talk to students,- if they know how to rough-tune their language to the student’ level. Then the students get a chance to hear language which is their own productive level, but which they can more or less understand. Such ‘comprehensible input’ (a term coined by the American methodologist Stephen Krashen)- where students receive rough-tuned input in a relaxed and unthreatening way is an important feature in language acquisition.

     The best lessons are ones where STT is maximized, but where at appropriate moments during the lesson the teacher is not afraid to summarize what is happening, tell a story, enter into discussion etc. Good teachers use their common sense and experience to get the balance right.

G.  What are the best kinds of lesson?

One of the greatest enemies of successful teaching is student boredom. This is often caused by the deadening predictability of much classroom time. Students frequently know what is going to happen in class and they know this because it will be the same as what happened in the last class and a whole string of classes before that. Something has to be done to break the chain.

In his monumental book, Breaking Rules, John Fanselow suggest that,   both for the teacher’s sanitary and the student’s continuing involvement, teacher’s need to violate their own behavior patterns. If a teacher normally noisy and energetic as a teacher, her or she should spend a class behaving calmly and slowly. Each time teacher break one of their own rules, in other words, they send a ripple through the class. That ripple is a mixture of surprise and curiosity and it is a perfect starting point student involvement.

The need for surprise and variety within a fifty-minute lesson is also overwhelming. If, for example, students spend all of that time writing sentences, they will probably get bored. But if, in that fifty minutes, there are a number of different task with a selection of different topics, the students are much more likely to remain interested. This can be seen most clearly with children at primary and secondary levels, but even adults need a varied diet to keep them stimulated.

However, variety is not the same as anarchy. Despite what we have said, students tend to like a certain amount of predictability: they appreciate a safe structure which structure which they can rely on. And too much chopping and changing – too much variety in a fifty-minute lesson can be destabilizing. Good teachers find a balance between predictable safety and unexpected variety.

H.    How important is it to follow a pre-arranged plan?

It is one thing to be able to plan lessons which will have variety. A balance has to be struck between teachers attempting to achieve what they set out to achieve on the one hand and responding to what students are saying or doing on the other.

Even though a lesson may have already been planned, a teacher will still need to make decisions that relate to the needs of his or her specific class, adapting the lesson from the book in different ways make it better suit the class. This process of planning and adaptation is a crucial dimension of teaching because during this process the teacher makes many decisions that are essential for a successful lesson.

Suppose that the teacher has planned that students should prepare a dialogue and then act it out, after which there is a reading text and some exercise for them to get through. The teacher has allowed twenty minutes for dialog preparation, and acting out. But when the students start walking on this activity, it is obvious that they need more time. The teacher then discovers that they would like to spend at least half the lesson on just the acting-out phase which they are finding helpful and enjoyable. At the moment, he or she has to decide whether to abandon the original plan and go along with the students’ wishes or whether it is better to press ahead regardless.

Good teachers are flexible enough to cope with these situations. Because they are focusing on the students and what they need, they are able to react quickly to the unplanned event. Good teachers recognize that their plans are only prototypes and they may have to abandon some or all of them if things are going too fast or too slow. Good teachers are flexible.