Teacher's Responsibilities

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.

Best Teacher

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.

Students' achievement

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 Differences

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 and Education

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.

Emotional Intelligence

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.

Cooperative Learning

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.

Moral Education

Moral education is very important in shaping the society. Any responsible person who holds the following values is a moral person: respects others, tolerates differences, peaceful and loving. Kant define moral person by saying that no one is born as good or bad, but moral education assists the process of raising a moral child. Vygotsky also said that society has an important influence in the shaping of moral person, especially in early childhood years due to the number of interactions the child conducts with socio-cultural environment. School is one of the institutions that help in guiding students to be moral person especially that global values such as respect and democracy can be taught to students effectively with the help of hidden or formal curriculum. But as we know, teachers' behaviors and attitudes that serve as role models would affect students' actions permanently, so the teachers should be trained well to acquire the necessary skills and knowledge to create classroom environments that touch on moral education aspects.

Large Classes

How large is a class to be considered a large one? It is a relative answer. There is no quantitative definition of what constitutes a large class. Every culture has its own opinion toward large classes, in Europe a class with 20 students is considered as large class, but in china the large class has between 50-100 students. To be more specific a large class is one with students than the teacher prefers to manage and available resources can support. Different problems would face the teacher in large classes such as loss of control and management, there would be more distractions, and high noise level where some large classes may become out of hand when students are working in pairs or groups. In my opinion large classes provide more opportunities for co-students' interaction in which it creates an atmosphere of cooperation, and encourage creativity. It is important to notice that difficulties associated with large classes can also be found in small classes, so we should not only see one face which is the negative one, but we should see it's good and positive face which provides many opportunities for learning and teaching.

Interaction in the Classroom

A major process in the school system is interaction. Messages concerning expectations, power relations, and attitudes toward others and the learning process are passed on through verbal and non-verbal cues. The daily student-teacher interactions and interpersonal relations determine the atmosphere of the classroom. It is important to consider that between 300 and 600 interactions take place in one hour of class time. Consider also that for every spoken message there are several unspoken messages given through tone, gesture, and facial expressions. Those unspoken messages can tell us more about the climate of the classroom than any spoken words. The interaction between the teacher and the student affect largely students' performance and learning.

Blogging for the first time

This is my first experience in blogging, it seems to be complicated; however it is interesting to share my thoughts and have benefits from others' ideas about education and other important aspects in our lives. Through blogging i can communicate with my future students easily and integrate technology into the classroom in an efficient way. I am interested in using blog in order to facilitate my job as a professional teacher in the future, it may takes more time to be more professional but i'm ready to learn.