Teachers have
many responsibilities. Behaving in a way that embodies the ideal
teacher-learner relationship creates a culture of mutual respect, minimizes the
likelihood of student mistreatment, and optimizes the educational outcomes. The
responsibilities of the teacher are many such as, giving learners timely,
constructive, and accurate feedback, submit grades and evaluations within 4
weeks of the end of a course, be prepared and on time for all activities,
provide learners with current material and information and appropriate
educational activities, treat learners fairly and respectfully, stimulate
students' critical thinking, ask them skillful questions, keep classroom assessment
results confidential and protects students right of privacy, and use assessment
procedures as a learning tool and as a punishment tool.
Most of students have had a teacher who has made
a difference in their lives, helping them see the world differently, making
them feel proud and motivating them to achieve more and more. Some students
have even been lucky enough to have more than one. Long after leaving school,
students remember fondly and in graphic detail, those teachers who cared, and
painfully those who did not. They may recall the content these teachers taught,
but their human impact is indelibly imprinted in their minds. Teachers have
different styles and strategies, and every teacher has his/her own method in
teaching students. One of my teachers could not be forgotten, he is a
mathematics teacher in the high school. What makes this teacher so inspiring is
that he does not only teach from books but from his passion. He does not start
class away with lectures but with warm greetings. His willingness to build
relationship with students makes him a different teacher out of many.
Poverty affects students' achievement negatively, where many studies had shown that low achiever students belong to families of low socio-economic status or to low income families. Maybe those families cannot prepare their children well for school, lack of resources, health and nutrition problems, all of these and other factors would affect students' learning negatively. But there are many examples of people who are from poor families and reach high education levels, maybe they worked hard and they found support from their teachers, families, or society. Also it has been shown that parental educational level and income have a significant effect on students’ achievement, where high achievement or successful students belong to higher parental education and income, and low achievement students belong to lower parental education and income. Highly educated families with high income and better jobs prepare their children better for school.
Gender
represents another set of differences found in classroom. One important
question for teachers and many others in society has been how boys and girls,
men do and women, differ? Biology and hormones affect the kinds of play and
activities that boys and girls do, boys are more aggressive. Another evidence
of the origin of these differences is the treatment of parents with their sons
and daughters, where they are more roughly with sons and more socialized with
their daughters. Also they provide sons more independence and daughters more
protection. Those differences are seen largely within the classrooms, where
many teachers interact differently boys than they do with girls, they ask boys
more questions, giving them more praise because boys are more active in
learning. As teachers we should make balance between girls and boys and make
sure that our language and curriculum materials are gender free.
Technology is an
important aspect in our lives today; it touches almost every part of our daily
lives, society, and homes. Integrating technology into classroom means more
than teaching computer skills and software programs in a separate computer
class. Effective technology integration must happen across the curriculum in a
way that deepen understanding and enhance learning process. This integration
supports students learning, where it would provide active engagement,
participation in group, frequent interaction, and connection to real world experience
and situations. Internet and technology or online world provides each
classroom with more interesting, diverse, and current learning materials. Technology
tools provide numerous opportunities for expressing understanding through
images, sounds, and texts, where students are more likely to stay engaged on
the task.
Plato claimed that all learning has an emotional base. The ability to express and control our own emotions is important, but so is our ability to understand, interpret, and respond to the emotions of others. Imagine a world where you couldn't understand when a friend was feeling sad or when a co-worker was angry. This ability is described as emotional intelligence. Mayer proposed a model that identified four different factors of emotional intelligence: the perception of emotion, reasoning with emotions, the ability to understand emotion and the ability to manage emotions. Improving our emotional intelligence skills can help us in being effective throughout the day when we are guiding our students, making decisions, negotiating with others (teachers, parents, coordinators) and getting our daily work done.
In first year of teaching, you find yourself in a
school where teachers have not paid much attention to cooperative learning in
the past. It is not that they are against cooperative learning; they simply
have chosen to stick to more traditional, teacher-centered approaches. But you
strongly believe in the effectiveness of cooperative learning for goals you
value as a teacher. Cooperative learning should be a part of every beginning teacher's repertoire. Inexperienced teachers, however, should be careful and should know about the difficulties involved in implementing cooperative learning in some settings. Cooperative learning is considered as an effective means to increase positive student social behavior and to correct many of the social injustices that exist in our society. It creates a learning environment that is characterized with democratic processes in which students assume active roles and take responsibility for their own learning.
