Luiz Rose shares some online tool ideas to help teachers take ownership of their professional development and encourage more effective teaching.
Teachers have an immense impact on student’s learning. The more effective the teacher, the more students learn and feel engaged and motivated. If you want to become a more effective teacher you should seek for knowledge that will help you show your students how they can learn better, improve your classroom management skills and help you plan lessons more effectively.
You can achieve that by either taking a professional development course or learning yourself or both. The best way to start is to pinpoint the areas you need more improvement. Cambridge English has devised a framework called Cambridge English Teaching Framework that will help you with that. The framework is divided into four stages of teacher development, from Foundation to Expert, and five categories of teaching knowledge and skills. Each category describes the key competencies for effective teaching at each stage.
The first step is to determine each stage you are for each category. Cambridge has also devised a Quiz called Teacher Development Tracker to help you with this. Once you have determined your present stage on the framework it is time to determine where you want to get to. You probably don’t need to become an expert in all the categories!
In order to help you develop further, Cambridge gives you several recommendations. To do this, simply select the relevant framework category from the the link above to find them. Many of the recommendations are links to free articles found on the internet. You can also develop further by reading and studying from our Professional Development titles.
Another alternative is to take one or more of our online courses. After studying for some time, it is always a good idea 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 very hard to accomplish. With the correct tools you can hopefully start seeing results both in and outside the classroom.