By Mohamed ELKADAOUI | MoroccoEnglish.com
All of us used to have favorite teachers throughout our educational experience. Each one of them must have had certain traits which made their teaching influencing in the class. Generally, Becoming effective teachers requires having a set of qualities that we should take into account:
1- Love your job: successful teachers are who love and enjoy their job. Lack of passion for teaching can extremely affect negatively your efficiency quicker than anything else.
2- Build a good rapport with your students: Grow a good relationship with students. Show your support and concern to them. Show your care about their progress and success. Treat them with respect and avoid embarrassing them in class.
3- Establish a positive atmosphere in the class: Make your students feel at ease, safe and valued. Welcome their opinions and suggestions. Allow them to take their time when they are struggling to express their ideas. Never forget to greet your classes with your smile at the beginning of session. Accept their laughter from time to time. Always consider praising your students and encourage them with positive feedback. Besides, don’t over correct your students especially in fluency-oriented activities. Know when to correct and what techniques of correction to adopt such as self-correction or peer-correction.
4- Be a good motivator: Spreading the sense of motivation among the class makes the process of teaching takes the very right path towards the effectiveness. In this respect, there are various strategies should be maintained by the teacher to motivate students. Involving students in varied and fun activities in the class takes major part in their motivation. Besides, good teacher motivators run group activities; so when preparing lessons they usually include pair or group works in their lesson plans.
5- Be proactive not reactive: This means you should address problems before they arise. This trait has a great impact on classroom management. In this regard, to build this effective quality, you should consider different strategies. First, be always consistent in dealing the students’ misbehaviors. Never say what you won’t do, otherwise you would encourage disruptions in the class. Thus, you would waste energy and time in reacting over the class unwanted scenarios. In addition, recognize and praise your students’ good behaviors instead of attracting their attention whenever any problem occurs. Spread the values of respect and responsibility among them instead of assuming that they know how they should behave correctly. Second, teachers need to ‘think on their foot’ so to absorb unexpected events in the class. Therefore, they should decide the right response when unexpected happens.
6- Think outside the box: Instead of following your fellows or sticking to the traditional methods, you should have sense of innovation and creativity in your teaching. As far as teaching is concerned, I believe that creative teacher equals to effective one. In this regard, He/she keeps doing his/her best outside the box to have different and more successful vision on the class. Thinking outside the box means approaching the class issues in innovative ways rather than the methods we normally adopt. When it comes to planning lessons, creative teachers work hard thinking of anything that can affect the teaching and learning process. In addition, they don’t only rely on textbooks and the board, but bring new deductive materiel and do implement ICT to make the class more fun and facilitate the learning task to the students. Creative teaching is much demanding and requires hard efforts because the teacher always puts blame on himself. Unlike the teachers who always blame students of their low level to justify their failure, and criticize the administration for not providing them with necessary materiel; creative teachers always rely on themselves and find their own way so to sustain the learning progress in their classes. Finally, as teacher trainees we ought to start thinking outside the box before we’re boxed in. We should get used to wearing the new glasses, the glasses of continuous field research and creativity.
7- Be well prepared: well preparation takes a major part in successful teaching. This, first of all, includes the teacher’s knowledge degree about the subject matter. Besides, this compelling trait links to how the teacher plans his lesson. Well planned lesson should first include the objectives the students will achieve by the end of the session. Second, It consists of every detail of the lesson project including the activities, tasks, teachers’ instructions and questions, and also the time setting for each stage. Well-preparation increases the teacher’s confidence and avoids problems in the class, and thus meets the students’ learning outcomes.
