When it comes to education, there is no fixed style of teaching. Each educator in an education school Singapore has their own unique strengths (and weaknesses) that play a significant role in determining their approach to teaching others. Regardless of that, one thing’s for certain: individuals are constantly changing and evolving for the better. By acquiring a better understanding of the individual self, one can embark on a better and more informed path to personal growth. Here are some key revelations to encourage your journey as an educator.
1. Reinvent Your Style
Consistency does not equate to being stagnant. One can be a consistently effective educator, however it shouldn’t restrict them to a singular teaching style for the entirety of their career. This is a fact of life as the human population continually amasses new knowledge through discoveries, inventions, and improvements every moment. As a result, methods for conveying knowledge through teaching will also change concurrently.
With that being said, the changes don’t have to be drastic or immediate. In fact, they should only change when deemed relevant or necessary. As the saying goes, “If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.” Getting timely feedback and improving on little details might prove to be more useful in the long-run in building up to a more cohesive, bigger picture.
2. Never Stop Learning
Learning has no age limit. Whether you’re young or old, there’s always something new to learn every day. Thus, even though you might be an educator, that isn’t an excuse for you to stop learning. Conversely, it should be a motivation for you to continually learn in order to keep your mind afresh and intellect nimble.
Actively seek out seminars, workshops, talks, and discussion panels to gain new insight into your interests. For example, if you’re interested in entrepreneurship, don’t be afraid to attend classes teaching how to open your own business. Even if you’re familiar with the subject at hand, don’t let your pride hold you back. There’s always bound to be something meaningful or insightful to be taken away from each experience.
3. Self-Awareness
Every educator would experience the pains of student evaluation at some point in their career. While this is instigated by the educational institutions in question, refrain from allowing the ratings and comments from students to frame your self-perception. Instead, take the evaluations with a grain of salt; internalize the constructive criticism but sieve out any unhelpful remarks.
By doing so, not only do you gain a practical understanding of your current aptitude as an educator, but it also behaves as a stepping stone to better self-awareness. Do note, self-awareness shouldn’t be all critical. Appreciate the positives in your teaching and take pride in those achievements, no matter how ‘small’.
4. Find the Links
Teaching is all about finding the connections between otherwise arbitrary information. It’s how we assemble pieces of information to form a collective puzzle of knowledge. Therefore, before each semester begins, it might prove useful to carefully analyze your subject/course objectives: how can you tie these objectives together to flow into a fluid narrative or logical factual sequence?
5. Don’t Rush the Process
If you’re a believer in “everything happens for a reason,” perhaps you could inject an additional layer of “everything occurs in its own time”. Drawing on the importance of gradually changing one’s teaching style, a practical application of such would be to either make minor changes across the semester or wait until the next semester begins before implementing it. This could happen in the form of altering the kind of course assessments or changing the course requirements or even adding/removing topics. All these require time and patience and should not be rushed haphazardly. Desired changes require careful and meticulous planning.
6. Every Student is Different
This is probably one of the most frequent things that educators neglect, but every student has their own learning pace. Just because a group of 40 students are banded together in a single class, does not mean that they’re all learning at an equal level. Every individual processes information differently and these different learning curves should be acknowledged.
Thus, be sensitive during class discussions and participations to identify those students struggling or falling behind. Additionally, be attentive when grading their coursework to truly identify those with difficulty in grasping complex concepts. By being aware of such issues earlier on, it enables you to pre-emptively address them before they worsen.
7. Interference vs. Interjection
The major difference between interference and interjection is the importance to not intervene in your students’ learning unnecessarily. Although it may be tempting to hand-feed your students the answers, they should ultimately be the one to formulate their answers and arrive at their own conclusions. As an educator, your role is merely to guide them towards these revelations. Essentially, the hallmarks of good teaching should mostly facilitate independent learning.
8. Collaboration
When it comes to the education sector, working solo is not advisable. Teaching can be intimidating with so many aspects to account for such as lesson plans, material prep, syllabus arrangement, and so forth. It will be immensely helpful if you shadow a few colleague’s lessons and likewise them for yours. This way, both sides can be mutually beneficial, potentially inspiring each other to teach more effectively or resolving a pitfall in respective teaching style. Subsequently, use these takeaways to hone student-teacher interaction during class to determine what methods best suit the current class. Through the power of mere collaborative observation, one’s teaching could be easily elevated to the next level.
9. Read Widely
Don’t be afraid to go back to the basics. Texts are mankind’s original sources of knowledge. We record all informational archives in books in hopes of keeping insights alive throughout generations. As a continually diminishing and underrated activity, reading is truly a mental playground at its core. It acts as a conduit from one individual’s thought to another, elucidating on ideas and opinions from centuries past. Thus, don’t hesitate to flex your mental muscles and let your creative juices flow by indulging in all genres of books, fiction and non-fiction.
10. Be the Change You Want to See
As cliché as this sounds, your surroundings are a manifestation of your inner self. If you constantly exude negative energy by gossiping about your students or complaining about the workload, the classroom atmosphere would naturally reflect this somber and unpleasant mood. Learning and teaching is a two-way street: it requires the participation of both parties to absorb and reciprocate energy levels and attitudes correspondingly.
No one can deny that being a student and/or educator is hard. Both have their fair share of struggles but both strive to uplift and spur each other on. Thus, be the positive light in your classroom today, and see how the class’ mood shifts according to your energy given out during lesson time.
Since teaching and learning are all subjective experiences, there aren’t any clear-cut methods or cheat codes to achieving them at the optimal level. The irony is that the best ways to learn how to teach is through trials and failures themselves. Therefore as a teacher, don’t be afraid to be a student yourself.