How To Improve In Teaching: 7 Modern Tips To Improve Your Teaching Skills Today.

In the age we are today, improving your teaching skills is imperative and can be quite rewarding. It can help you keep your student’s attention, and keep them receptive, interactive and engaged. Your ability to magically transform a dull topic into a lively and exciting session is assured when you possess appropriate teaching skills, students will always look forward to your lessons and passing tests for such students becomes much of a norm, and this leaves you highly motivated. Sounds Interesting? If yes, Read through as we …

7 Modern Tips To Improve Your Teaching Skills Today.

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The advancement of technology today has made it imperative that every year, teachers are encouraged to step up their game, and be updated to be able to improve their teaching skills.

Below are the seven (7) modern tips you can use to improve your teaching skills:

Embrace Technology: Technology has brought about changes that play an integral part in the accomplishment of significant improvements in the overall level of productivity for both the education sector and the agricultural sector. That is to say that the internet has limitless educational resources for anyone wishing to improve their teaching skills. Digital-assisted learning tools such as software programs, educational apps, and handheld devices can help you to increase students’ motivation and engagement.

Worth noting, there is rapid digitalisation of education, and teachers should take the opportunity in order to incorporate digital learning tools along with core teaching skills. Game-based learning is the newest teaching innovation. It combines learning along with game-play. This can make your classes more fun and engaging. Other tools like online quizzes, animations and videos are all useful tools for teaching. With the help of technological tools, teachers can create their own modules and customise lesson plans. For teachers who want to upgrade their technological skills, there are many online resources available to help them.

Develop Your Microteaching Skills: Microteaching skill is another new innovation in education. Microteaching skills are a special set of skills that help teachers to deliver lessons more effectively. The process of microteaching is many it all depends on the individual tests, however, look at the following ideas:

• Planning: Before conducting a class, you are encouraged to plan the lesson and the method by which you want to teach it.
• Teaching: Follow the teaching plan and conduct a class according to what you have prepared for.
• Observation: After conducting the class, observe how the students absorb it by asking the question.
• Updating plan-From the feedback: Update your earlier plan according to the feedback received. Create a new plan including the necessary strategies that you have learnt through observation.
• Re-teaching with the updated plan: Use the updated plan to conduct another class which includes improved strategies.
• Re-observation: Observe the classroom reaction and take feedback again.

Improve Your Communication Skills: There is no doubt that the quality of a class greatly depends on the teacher-student interaction. Your ability to communicate with the students will set the learning environment of the class. Communication skills are very good ingredients for improved student-teacher education. An example of communication skills are as follows:

• Active listening
• Unbiased feedback
• Presentation skills
• Tone and voice modulation
• Use positive reaffirmations

Try To Know Your Students’ Traits: Knowing your students’ personality traits, tendencies, and adaptability is very important and will help you uncover who your students are and who they are not. Adopting DISC-based assessments such as the PeopleKeys Student Strengths Report into your curriculum will help you better in improving your students’ performance, improve their productivity, and better communicate with them. By learning your students’ personalities, you can place them in more effective groups and help each student become a better collaborator while engaging them in a learning style that best suits their personality traits. You will be a stronger influence in their lives while encouraging them to be more confident in their educational studies.

Use Co-operative Learning: There is always a better understanding when you divide your students into groups. Members of each group should have a face to face interaction, positive interdependence, and individual accountability. Research shows that cooperatively taught students tend to be more analytical, innovative, creative, and critical and have a better understanding of learned materials than conventionally taught students.

Evaluate Your Performance: After every academic year, stop and think about everything that had transpired. Ask yourself some questions like, Did you reach your goals for the year? Were there activities that you could improve on? Did your students appreciate your style of teaching? What worked and what didn’t work?

Asking yourself these questions can help you evaluate and revise your teaching style for the year to come. Gather everything you can about what happened to better prepare you for what will happen next. Reflect on how you want to move forward with teaching the next time you step into a classroom.

Meet With Fellow Teachers: Sometimes, inspiration will come from chatting with another teacher. If you have the opportunity to meet with a group of teachers, either from your school or from another, you should grab the chance to interact with them. You’ll never know what you’ll learn from spending the day with fellow teachers. You can all exchange tips and experiences.

Use Behavioral Awareness: It is rewarding if you utilise the DISC method in your classroom. It will enable you to coach and teach students in ways that will prove to empower them while building necessary soft skills. You will inherently provide each student with more one-on-one attention while enabling them to lead and communicate more effectively with each other.

An E-style student, for example, may have the ambition and willpower to complete a decent project on time, but if teamed up with a C personality style, that pair will have the right detail orientation to create a more memorable project and earn a higher grade. Likewise, the I-type personality has the right people skills to get through to the S-type student, who might be struggling with confidence and has a fear of not fitting in. That same S student will provide that I student with more grounding and stability, where they can be fundamentally all over the place and unable to focus.

Utilizing Student Strengths, you are able to connect with the core of your students, understand what is not being said, and captivate them with positive thinking. It assesses the strengths and limitations of each student while providing a cheat sheet on how to avoid conflict. The assessment also offers great advice that can be used for determining future career paths – something you can use to encourage your students to go above and beyond, based on their interests and their interests alone.

Learn To Handle Unruly Behaviours: Connecting with your students is imperative. You can always do this by engaging them in small talk. However, when doing so, beware of students who have unruly behaviours. These are the types who will always want to create unnecessary disruptions. A majority of them are attention seekers, and there are proven techniques and methodologies involved in managing them effectively.

Identify Instructional Objectives: Write down some observable activities that your students should be able to accomplish at the end of the content/lesson. The action should be directly observable. Keeping instructional objectives in mind is a proven way to facilitate the construction of in and out-of-class activities and tests. When students are explicitly aware of what is required of them, they will rise up to meet your expectations.

Read About: How to Learn Faster: 13 Scientifically Proven Learning Strategies

Teaching The Teachers:

What does “teaching the teachers” mean? The term teaching the teacher refers to ways of enabling teachers to develop their ability to help students to learn. It can denote a range of activities and have a variety of outcomes
Having thought through the responses to the questions above, teachers should be clearer about what they require in order to develop their teaching. This, in turn, will help with the choice of activity to meet these requirements.

For example, if more feedback is desired, then this may be gained in a variety of ways, such as from colleagues observing teaching sessions and offering feedback on prespecified areas; from students through specifically designed feedback sheets or by discussion in focus groups; from videoed teaching and subsequent analysis, with or without the help of a colleague or educationalist.

If more information on the learning process is desired, then a textbook on learning in higher education or on the psychology of learning, perhaps using the recommendation of a friend or colleague in the education department, is a good starting place. The point is that there are a number of ways of enhancing teaching ability besides enrolling on courses.

To make good use of a course, or any other way of building knowledge or skills and enjoyment of teaching, it is important to have a clear view about what one wishes to learn and why. This does not imply that unexpected learning is not valuable; indeed it may prove of more worth than the intended outcome. However, time is precious and making a thought-through choice of learning activity will increase the likelihood that the desired goal is achieved. Additional learning is then a bonus.

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