Effective Teaching.edited.docx

Effective Teaching A student spends most of her productive waking hours in school. Thus, teachers play a pivotal role in her life. It is very important for a teacher to assess the needs of her students. A comfortable and congenial environment is very important for effective teaching and learning. Students will feel motivated to learn only if they understand the significance of what they are learning. A teacher knows that all the knowledge imparted in school, according to the prescribed syllabus, may not directly fulfill the needs of each of her students. However, through her teaching, she can create the need, the urge to learn by connecting the theoretical with the practical i.e. interlinking the knowledge that she wants to impart with the day-to-day relevance of such knowledge. It is very important for a teacher to plan her lessons in advance. However, sticking to the plan to the core is not advisable. There should be enough scope in her lesson plan to incorporate changes that make teaching and learning more effective. A teacher, who is prepared, is confident. She comes across as someone who is sure of what she is doing and this creates a degree of trust between the students and the teacher. If I am interested in the topic that I am teaching, students will also be interested. People naturally feel drawn towards people who are sprightly. Stress is a part of everyone’s life these days including students. Thus, it is important for the teacher to be happy, lively and enthusiastic so that learning becomes interesting. As a human being, I know that it is very difficult for me to pay attention to something that I am naturally not interested in. The same applies to students. Lessons can be made interesting by involving the students in the learning process. They shouldn't be passive listeners. Regular questioning and inviting suggestions and opinions from them, forces them to concentrate. The teacher can quote famous personalities, use examples from popular T.V. programmes, movies, books etc. Creative association between the lesson and popular media captivates the attention of students and helps in retention. The students should know that the teacher has put in a lot of effort to make her lesson interesting. Students respect teachers who do that and try their best to please them by being more efficient themselves. Students don’t like it if they are expected to acquire a whole lot of new skills to understand what is being taught. While delivering her lesson, a teacher should be able to utilize the existing skills of her students to the optimum. She should understand that new skills can be

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acquired only gradually with a lot of hand holding. Also, children shouldn’t be insulted if they don’t know the things that the teacher thought they knew. Everyone deserves to be treated with respect. Just because a teacher is older than her students does not authorize her to be rude and insensitive towards her students. So a teacher should try her best to be likable and approachable. It is only when you give the respect that you get respect. And If I as a teacher get respect, then, I will also feel motivated to be a good teacher. I know it is not possible to be a perfect human being. Also, it is very difficult to be around perfectionists. When a teacher acknowledges some of her shortcomings, mistakes and choices she made in life and shares her own school life experiences, children feel more comfortable with her. They feel less pressurized. So the aim of a teacher should not to be to become perfect but be someone who is human, humane and wants to make a positive difference in the lives of her students.

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Is Homework Outdated in Today’s Educational System?

Gone are the days when school children across America had to trudge through several inches of snow to make their way to one-room schoolhouses. Likewise, fallen by the wayside is the use of the three R's as the primary curriculum for this nation's schools. A rap across the hand with a ruler is no longer used as a method of classroom discipline. Many of the traditions and standards of education have become antiquated and outdated. Perhaps the next casualty of societal change should be the widespread use of homework as a learning tool for today's children.

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Education and society as a whole have grown increasingly more complex. Society bears little resemblance to what it was just a few short years ago. Children today face an entirely different school day than that of their parents and grandparents and the children of decades ago. National and state standards require a much more rigorous program of study for today's student. As a result, the curriculum is greatly expanded with many concepts being introduced at a much earlier grade level. In order to accommodate the expanded curriculum and mandated standards of accountability, there has been a major decrease in the amount of recess, play and non-structured time for the average schoolchild. The average student now participates in a variety of after-school activities. Football,

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basketball, choir, band, and cheer have been joined by soccer, dance, volleyball, softball, baseball, golf, quiz bowl, cross-country, academic decathlon, and a variety of other activities that place tremendous demands on the student’s time. Activities not related to school but also demands student time include little league baseball, softball, football, and basketball as well as dance, cheer, motocross, and church activities. Factor in students who also work part time and

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you have a group of children who usually have their evenings filled with extracurricular activities. In today's society, we have students who spend their day in school and their evenings occupied with extra-curricular activities. Often the student doesn't even arrive at home until nine or ten o'clock in the evening. The student that arrives home late after a long day at school, followed by an evening spent in an extra-curricular activity is faced with few options in regards to homework. He/she could spend a considerable amount of time completing the homework assignments and end up going to bed exhausted in the early morning hours. The end result is an exhausted student who is not likely to be in the best condition for learning in class. The child may or may not do the

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assignment or at best only give a half-hearted effort to do the work. This student would likely suffer the consequences in the form of a lower grade or in some cases, punishment in the form of detention, added assignments, or other similar negative consequences. Even very young children are not immune from the effects of homework. It is not uncommon for first and second-grade students to have a large amount of homework. The drive for accountability has created a school environment that places a premium on instructional time. Recess has been gradually eroded to the point the average elementary child has only ten to fifteen minutes of unstructured play time per day. In many school districts recess has been eliminated altogether. Add a large homework assignment each evening and it raises a significant question; when do kids get the chance to be kids?

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Another significant question is what do kids do when they reach a point that they don’t understand how to do an assignment? Politicians, school administrators, and teachers say that parents need to get involved and help the child. That answer assumes the parent knows how to do the math problems, algebra, etc. How many parents have worked through a math problem with their child, found the right answer only to have the problem counted wrong because it was not worked in the process the teacher and the text required? Parents may not have been exposed to certain scientific principles or even have a background in how to diagram a sentence, among other current classroom skills. Too often, parents helping their child results in a process where they are using information and skills they learned over a quarter of a century ago. An example of how homework has lost its usefulness in today's schools is a recent

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orientation at a junior high school during the first week of school. The Principal, who had more than twenty years of experience, was beginning his first year as Principal of that particular school. He spoke to an overflow crowd of parents and children who had filled the gymnasium to hear what the new Principal had to say. He spoke of the high goals he had set for the school and was greeted with applause for his ideas. He then spoke of homework as a great learning tool and said that his teachers had been instructed to make sure every child in the school had two to three hours of homework every night since this was an outstanding way to build character. There was no applause on this point, only loud murmurs of disbelief and anger. This illustrates the clash of an outdated approach coming face-to-face with the reality of today's lifestyle.

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Other options should be available to allow the students to rehearse their skills rather than continuing on with this dinosaur of the past. Since the great majority of the school day is now devoted to instructional activities this is where the great majority of rehearsal activities should take place. Having this work done at school rather than at home provides a great benefit. First, it allows the child who has spent the entire day engaged in academics to have time to be a kid, to explore other interests such as extracurricular activities, interests and hobbies which have an educational effect in that it broadens the child's horizons. Another benefit of having the homework done in class is that it allows the teacher to be the person that shows the child how to solve the math problem, or discuss the real meaning of the history or literature question. This allows the person trained to teach these concepts to do the actual teaching; not a parent who may not know the exact process the teacher is looking for. Additionally, this approach should greatly reduce the stress the child suffers from spending the great majority of their time after school on homework. If the child goes to school more rested and relaxed the next day the more likely he/she will be able to grasp the concepts being taught much more quickly. Without a doubt, it is time to rescue today’s children from yesterday’s educational practices. Let’s take schoolwork from the home and put it back into the school so that trained professionals can fine tune these skills in an educational setting. Let’s give the students in today’s schools the opportunity to be children. It’s time to put homework to rest with the other educational dinosaurs of the past.

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Reference Supriya Prathapan. (2015). Effective Teaching. Retrieved from http://www.edarticle.com/article/2004/effective-teaching.php Jackie Paxton. (2015). Effective Teaching. Retrieved from http://www.edarticle.com/article/2004/effective-teaching.php