Wednesday, July 31, 2024
How can you take your teaching to the next level? What can you do to become a better, more competent and more confident teacher? In this blog post we will look at ten ways we can improve our teaching techniques and approaches and reach that next level as a professional teacher. Give some of these things a try and see how you can also level up your teaching!
Regularly reflect on your teaching practices. Think about what went well in your lessons and what could be improved. Reflective journals, peer observations, and feedback from students can help you gain insights into the effectiveness of your teaching. In doing so, you can focus on areas that you think you need to work on as well as things that you are already doing well. This is something that both new and experienced teachers can do because there are always things that we could do differently or better, we just need to be aware of them.
Engage in professional development opportunities such as workshops, seminars, conferences, and online courses related to teaching. Stay updated with the latest trends, research, and best practices in education. Reading blog posts (like this one) and interacting with other teachers in forums is another way of discussing new ideas that you can then bring into your classroom. Conferences are also a great way to meet other teachers and to discover new ideas and activities that you can incorporate into your lessons.
Actively seek feedback from your students, colleagues, and academic management. Use this feedback to identify areas for improvement and make adjustments to your teaching methods accordingly. Student feedback is often best gathered anonymously in the form of surveys. You can easily do this online with resources such as Google Forms. You can also ask colleagues and members of academic management to observe your classes and give you feedback based on their observations.
There are always new apps, online resources and technology tools that you can try out and use to enhance your teaching. While not all of them may work for you, you may come across a tool that really adds something to your lesson. It’s important not to be afraid of new technology but rather to embrace it. The chances are that your students, especially the younger ones will really appreciate it.
When we first qualify as teachers, we tend to focus on what we are doing rather than what the learners are doing. As we gain more experience we can shift towards a more student-centred approach where students take an active role in their learning process. This can be done by encouraging student autonomy, trying out discovery-based learning and by doing collaborative projects in class.
There are many different approaches to teaching that you have perhaps heard about but never had the confidence to try. You could try a task-based-learning lesson where the learners use authentic language to complete meaningful tasks in the target language. Or you could try teaching Dogme style and go into the lesson with little or no material and see where the learners take you (only to be tried with groups that produce a lot of language). Other techniques you could try are TPR (total physical response) or task-based learning.
No matter how experienced a teacher you are, you can always improve your own knowledge of the language. It is important to continually work on your own language proficiency. This might include your range of vocabulary or your pronunciation and refining your grammar knowledge. By doing so, you will feel better able to clarify these things for your learners and you will feel more confident answering those tricky questions which you hadn’t prepared for that tend to come up in lessons.
For all teachers, the coursebook is extremely useful as it provides the majority of content for our lessons. However, sometimes it can also be good to change things up a little bit and bring other, authentic material into the classroom. This can be really motivating for the learners because it shows them that they are able to understand and use ‘real’ English. It also makes a change from using the same material in every lesson. The main challenge here is to make sure that the activities you create are appropriate for the learners and help them to develop their language skills.
9. Develop your cultural competence.
This is important if you are teaching students with a different cultural background to your own. Develop your cultural competence by gaining insights into the cultural backgrounds, customs, and communication styles of your students. Be sensitive to cultural differences and adapt your teaching strategies to create an inclusive and respectful learning environment.
The main idea behind all of the points above is to try new ways to help you develop and level up as a teacher. Of course, trying new things involves an element of risk as you don’t know for sure whether they will work in practice or not. However, if we don’t take these risks and try new ideas and approaches in our teaching, we will never take that next step as teachers since we will be doing the same things that we have always done. So, take some risks, try something new, and see where it takes you and your teaching.
We hope you have found this blog post on levelling up your teaching useful. There are lots of great ideas in here for you to try and we hope it gives you some inspiration for how you can take your teaching to the next level. Good luck and have fun trying them out!
