Luiz Rose shares his ideas on becoming a more effective teacher and what resources are available to help.
Teachers have an immense impact on student’s learning. The more effective the teacher, the more students learn, feel engaged and are motivated.
If you want to become a more effective teacher you should seek to develop your knowledge about effective teaching. Perhaps you could help show your students how they can learn better, improve your classroom management skills or help you plan lessons more effectively. You can achieve that by either taking a professional development course, teaching yourself, or both. I would recommend that the best way to start is to pinpoint the areas where you feel you need more improvement.
The Cambridge English Teaching Framework
Cambridge English has devised a framework called Cambridge English Teaching Framework. The framework is divided into four stages of teacher development, from Foundation to Expert. There are five categories of teaching knowledge and skills within each stage. The categories describe the key competencies for effective teaching.
Teacher Development Tracker
Another useful tool is a Quiz, devised by Cambridge called Teacher Development Tracker. The quiz is designed to help determine what stage you are at for each category. Once you have determined your present stage on the framework it is time to determine where you want to get to. Remember that you probably don’t need to become an expert in all the categories.
In order to help you develop further, Cambridge also gives you several recommendations. To find these simply select the relevant framework category. Many of the recommendations are really useful links to free articles.
Professional development courses
Two other more formal options are to consider reading and studying using one of Cambridge’s Professional Development titles, or taking one of Cambridge’s online teacher development courses.
Re-assess to check progress
After studying for some time, it is always a good idea to revisit your original goals or to take the Quiz again to determine if you are making progress. If you notice you are not making as much progress as you would like to perhaps it would be a good idea to change the way you are trying to develop. As you can see, becoming a more effective teacher is not something that is very hard to accomplish. With the correct tools you can start seeing results in a short time.
Make sure you explore Cambridge’s resources for more ideas on how to improve teacher effectiveness.