Education Tips: Develop your Educational Philosophy

Hopefully none of you have decided to become teachers so that you can enjoy the summer holidays. If you are still studying to become a teacher and this was the main reason for choosing this type of career: STOP NOW or you're in for an ugly surprise. Unlike regular jobs, teaching is a vocation, a strong desire to affect the future by educating young minds. Truth be told, teaching involves more work than most other jobs. The amount of planning and preparation involved takes a lot of time and, often, teachers have to work during their free time. Because of all this, it is important that all teachers develop their own philosophy that helps them stay motivated while doing their job. This is a list of questions that need to be considered while writing your educational philosophy:

• What is your definition of a good education? Why is a good education necessary?
• What defines a good teacher?
  
• How can you, as a teacher, contribute to education as a whole? Teaching is not only about following textbooks and correcting students' work; you need to involve yourself on a more personal level...think of ways to make education more effective and share your success with other educators.
• How will you make teaching more effective? (this can be tied in with the previous question)
  
• How do you feel when you think about expanding your students' knowledge?/As a teacher, what do you owe your students?

By writing down your educational philosophy you will be able to more easily understand what makes education important and, thus, helps you understand the importance of your role as an educator so that, ultimately, teaching becomes much more rewarding.

As per usual:
Please feel free to share more ideas with us by leaving a comment with this post.
Take care, and as always, I'll keep you posted.

Teaching tips: Dealing with difficult parents

As if our job is not made hard enough when we're given unruly students, we sometimes have to deal with difficult parents who seem to be hell-bent on making our lives more complicated. It is important to understand that these parents where once students themselves. As we all know, traditional teachers were allowed to use discipline policies which are generally frowned upon in today's modern classroom. Some traditional discipline methods included whole-class punishment, psychological abuse and, for the older parents, even corporal punishment. Of course things have now changed but it should come as no surprise that some parents regard teachers with great distrust; for them we are, and always will be, the scary dictators who ruined their childhood. You have a certain responsibility to show difficult parents that times have changed, show them that you are their friend and that you and them share a common interest: the success of the student. Showing them how concerned you are for their child's long-term well being is key for obtaining a healthy relationship with the parents. These points may help you deal effectively with difficult parents:

• When talking to them, make sure that your eyes are at the same level as theirs. Don't let them look down at you. If you are sitting down, then stand up.
  
• Listen attentively and don't interrupt. The need to justify yourself may be strong but it is important that you take your time to device a proper response.
• Be rational. Offer a reasonable solution to whatever it is that's bothering them and make sure that you both agree on the solution. It is important that you don't make compromises in order to avoid further conflicts, otherwise this may be harmful in the long run.
  
• Mind your Ps and Qs.
• Constantly be assertive, if the parent tries to verbally bully you need to show them that their behavior is unacceptable...if the parent doesn't get the gist then show them that you won't continue the discussion unless they change their attitude. This is EXTREMELY important, failing to do this might cause the situation to quickly get out of hand.
  
• If the parents try to haress you outside the school, then you have the right to call the police. Your responsibility does not extend outside your classroom.

Please feel free to share more ideas with us by leaving a comment with this post.
Take care, and as always, I'll keep you posted.

Teaching tips: The importance of teacher collaboration

As every teacher already knows, the job of a teacher is not only restricted to the classroom. Teaching involves a lot of time spent on planning lessons, creating resources and assessing students' work. Most people who are not teachers do not always appreciate how much time all this takes. Teacher to teacher collaboration can definitely make teaching easier by reducing time spent on planning and creating resources. It can also make teaching more effective when teachers give insight about the abilities or interests of individual students. I will be listing the different ways of teaching collaboration.

• Communication between colleagues: simply communicating with other teachers who are involved with your students' education is enough to find out more about the weaknesses, strengths or interests of the students. Use this knowledge to create more targetted lesson plans. For example: you might learn that your students are very interested in painting, so you might find that using the theme of art in your lessons will help students learn better.
  
• Share resources: why spend time creating lesson plans or resources when another teacher has already done this? Resources do not have to necessarily belong to your students' age group. Talk to the teachers who was teaching your students the year before and ask them for the lesson plans used for a particular subject that you are going to be teaching in the near future. Use this information to tie-in your lessons with what the students have done in previous years. This is a great way of introducing a new lesson.
  
• Share the work load: if you know of teachers teaching the same subject as you, then it might be a good idea to plan your lessons together. Decide on who does what; for example you can work on the lesson plans while the other teacher creates the resources to be used for those lessons.

Please feel free to share more ideas with us by leaving a comment with this post.
Take care, and as always, I'll keep you posted.

Social Networking Websites and Education

It's no secret that many schools discourage the use of social networking sites (SNSs) and some schools even go as far as to block access to these websites. SNSs allow people to publicize a lot of personal information which might jeopardize the professional relationship that teachers need to maintain with their students. There's also the fact that spending too much time on social networking sites, like Facebook and MySpace, will reduce productivity. However social networking websites are a social phenomenon and it is not showing signs of slowing down. What teachers need to understand is that, on a very basic level, these websites are there to connect people and allow them to communicate better. Education is heavily dependent on communication, so SNSs can be seen as a powerful educational tool.


As I wrote earlier, if you sign up for an account on an SNS you need to make sure that you don't share any personal information that may cause 'role conflicts' in your work place. Having said that, a social networking site will allow you to automatically share important online resources with you colleagues. You might be able to find Social networking sites which offer tools specifically tailored for teachers. These SNSs are sometimes referred to as Niche Social Networking Sites, the niche being education. SNSs will also allow you to easily share with your students, any information related to school and to the subjects you are teaching them. Social networking websites are not only about connecting people, they also offer a new way for encouraging participation through open services.

Education - The importance of Technology in the Classroom

I am currently working on a thesis regarding the use of technology in the classroom. Below is an excerpt from my dissertation:

The use of computers and the Internet is fast becoming an important tool in the education sector. It is becoming very common for technology to be used for assessing, training and educating students. According to a number of studies conducted by Barbara Means et al. (1997), the use of technology in the classroom has a number of advantages including, better collaboration between students, enhancing student motivation and adding to the students’ perception that their work is credible when properly referenced from the internet. Most educators are overcoming the barrier posed by these ever-more sophisticated technological tools and they now understand that technology is a particularly important tool for assessing their students. The fact that modern students are very dependent on technology proves how important it is that their teachers employ more modern methods in their classroom so as to meet the interests and capabilities of their students.

The use of technology in the classroom can certainly make teaching easier and more efficient by saving us precious time. I am currently in the process of creating an online application (which is part of my thesis) to be used by teachers and their students. I had been searching online for the ultimate teaching tool for years and I failed to find it. The applications that I found were too complicated, limited in functionality, or required a monthly subscription payment...so I decided to create it myself. This will be a website created by a teacher for teachers and it will be 100% free. As you might have noticed, the website will be called Mentor Buddy (www.mentorbuddy.com). I'm putting the last finishing touches to the whole thing and hopefully it should be launched sometime in late October. In the meantime the internet has a wealth of resources for teachers: from lesson plans to tests ready for printing. The internet can make our job so much easier, the trick is to know how to search for the proper information.

Teaching: staying creative

It's easy enough for new teachers to let their enthusiasm create creative and fun lessons. However, more seasoned teachers usually struggle to deliver a certain level of creativity in their lessons. Enthusiasm may start running dry after some years, particularly if you are being given students who just don't seem to appreciate your efforts.

None-the-less, there is no excuse for delivering boring lessons. Here's a list of things to do to give that little extra-something in your classroom:

• Care about your students: Knowing your students as individuals and understanding their needs, will give you a big motivational boost.
• Games: the internet is the best way to get great ideas for games to be included in your lessons. Games don't need to be fancy. Simple crosswords, word puzzles can be easily included in exercises and they make such a big difference.
• Re-use old materials: there is nothing wrong with re-using lesson plans, games, activities, etc, from previous years. Just make sure that you deliver the lesson with the same enthusiasm as the first time.
• Be modern: stay up to date with what's going on in the world. You might never know when you'll be able to use the latest cartoon character or movie star in your lessons. You need to understand what students are interested in and then incorporate that in your lesson. All it takes is to ask some direct questions...you don't need to be a detective :)

That's it for today. I'll keep you posted.

Teaching: Effective classroom management

I have already written a post about effective classroom management. This should hopefully be a more detailed and direct post tackling the subject.
As a teacher you MUST avoid:

• Over-appeasing students: some teachers will do anything to be the students' best friend. Keep in mind that before you are the students' friend, you are their teacher. If punishment is needed then use it.
• Ambiguous questions: questions need to be direct and easy to understand. A good way of overcoming this problem is to tell students who have understood a question to explain it to their peers.
• Not learning students' names: it is very difficult to conduct an effective lesson when you don't know the names of your students since directing questions to particular students or correcting student's behavior becomes overtly-complicated.
• not acting on bad behavior: verbal threats alone will not accomplish anything.
• Ignoring bad behavior: this is a definite no-no. Bad behavior will not stop simply by ignoring it. Act immediately on it. Set down some ground rules and give out punishment if students challenge these rules. Punishment may involve writing lines, take away a fun activity, whole-class punishment (use this sparingly as a last resort)
• Standing in the same area of the class during lessons: While conducting your lessons, move around the whole area of your classroom. This will discourage bad behavior.
• Silent classes: unless the students are working on a test or an individual exercise, your classroom must not be silent. It should constantly be a flurry of ideas and information.
• Being too serious: Lessons need to have some fun elements in order to make it interesting otherwise students will get bored and break your class-rules. Crack some occasional jokes and use lots of media for your lessons. On the other hand you must not over do this, otherwise students will not take you seriously.
• Overpraising students: don't praise students for doing things that they are expected to do.

That's it for today. As always, If you have any questions or ideas that you want to share with everyone, feel free to leave a comment.