Becoming an excellent teacher isn’t something that happens overnight. Throughout the years of your education, you’ve been dedicated to developing your skills as a teacher. That development doesn’t stop when you have your own classroom! If you want to be an excellent and a certified teacher, there are several strategies and courses you can use to help make you more effective. For certifications you may also try https://www.teacher-certification-online.org/california-certification/.
Keep learning.
Classroom management strategies might not change a great deal over the years, but there are plenty of things that do change. There’s changing technology, improved understanding of childhood motivations, and new ways to approach old problems. By becoming a lifelong learner, you can continue to offer better instruction and information to the students in your classroom. Keeping up with the information with a Course Hero free account can go a long way toward improving your ability to manage your classroom.
Keep notes
Over the course of a semester or a year, you’ll get to know your students pretty well. Taking notes on daily behavior, however, will help you notice patterns and better understand how to influence the students in your care. Effective note-taking can also help when a student is in the process of identifying a learning disability or behavioral problem.
Develop rapport with students
There will always be some students you connect with better than others. In some cases, you’ll get along great with two or three, while in others, you’ll have a whole classroom that you have no trouble connecting with. Developing rapport, however, means building an effective relationship with all of your students. When they know that you’re interested in who they are, they’re more likely to care about everything you have to teach them!
Be positive
You probably aren’t in teaching for the money (and if you are, it might be time to consider a new career field). You choose to teach because you have a genuine passion for your subject and for the young people you get to interact with every day. Bring that positive attitude and that love of your job to the classroom every day. Be cheerful with your kids and they’ll be more likely to be cheerful with you!
Get organized
To some people, organization simply doesn’t come naturally. If you find yourself struggling to keep up with paperwork or regularly wondering what’s next on your schedule for the day, it’s important to take the steps you need to take in order to get organized. File papers carefully, especially when it comes to managing student work. Make sure you have a system in place for returning assignments. The more organized your classroom is, the less time you will have to spend dealing with paperwork and shuffling through things you’ve lost.
Stay flexible
You can design the best lesson plan in the world, but if it doesn’t work for your students, you’ll waste your time and theirs. Stay flexible! Some days, your lesson will go exactly according to plan. Other days, you’ll need to ball up your lessons and start over–and that’s okay! Flexibility is key to reaching all of the students in your class.
Be creative
Think about the lessons you remember most from your own school days. Chances are, the ones you remember most aren’t the ordinary lessons filled with lectures and worksheets. The lessons you remember most are the ones that were completely outside the box: hands-on activities, creative details, and lots of fun. A simple change in routine can wake kids up and make them pay much more attention to the lesson you’re teaching that day.
With every day that you spend in the classroom, your teaching skills will grow. Implementing these seven strategies will help make you a more effective teacher, build your students’ trust, and move you on your way to excellence.
