Learning Outside the classroom

10 Modern Teaching Skills

Do you possess Modern Teaching Skills? As with most professions today, there are rapid developments in teaching that are being driven by social and technological changes. Keeping up to date with these developments within education will pay dividends with improved teaching skills. The skills needed to be a great teacher have now changed; modern teachers need to be competent in many new skill sets that were unknown to their predecessors. So here are, in our opinion, the 10 skills Modern Teachers need to know.

Traditional Teaching Skills

These first 6 teaching skills (in red in the image) are not new, but their importance has increased significantly for the modern teacher.

# 1 Commitment: It is essential that teachers are committed to their work and to the education of young people. The responsibility that lies in the hands of a teacher is huge, so a modern teacher must always be aware of this and be truly engaged in their profession.

# 2 Preparation:  There used be a time when the right temperament enabled you to become a teacher. Nowadays it’s nigh on impossible to find a teacher without formal academic training. This requirement is increasing as education levels improve in society. The better prepared you are as a teacher, the more effective you’ll be, so you should pursue you studies with this ethos in mind.

# 3 Organization: Good organization and the planning of a course in advance are key factors for success. It is very important that a teacher organizes the lesson properly and allocates the time to cover it in its entirety. Students can tell a poorly planned class from a mile away and once they realise the teacher isn’t putting in the effort neither will they!

# 4 Tolerance: In an increasingly diverse and multicultural society, it is necessary for teachers to manage any prejudices they may have and to treat all their students equally without showing favouritism. It’s a very important teaching skill not to impose your world view on your students, instead you should openly discuss topics and let students decide for themselves.

#5 Story Telling: One of the best ways to teach and transfer ideas is through stories. The best teachers have used this method in their classes for centuries. Teaching a lesson by incorporating story-telling techniques is a fantastic teaching skill to develop at anytime. Utilizing it leaves your class wanting to find out what happens next. An engaged class is the best way to increase participation and collaboration.

#6 Open to Questions: Having discussions and collaborating in class are essential for encouraging students and implementing new teaching techniques. Teachers must be open to answering their students questions. Modern teachers truly listen to their students questions and answer them honestly, not just with a cursory or textbook response. It may sometimes occur that you don’t know the answer to a question or you don’t have the time! If this happens, don’t waffle or brush the question off, just explain that you will look in to it and get back to the student with a proper answer later.

New Teaching Skills

These new teaching skills complement the more traditional ones. These skills are associated with new technologies (in blue in the image). Incorporating these into your teaching repertoire will ensure you become a modern teacher.

# 7 Innovative: The modern teacher must be willing to innovate and try new things, both teaching skills and educational apps, ICT tools and electronic devices. The modern teacher must be an “early adopter”.

# 8 Tech Enthusiast: The modern teacher must not only be innovative but also be willing to explore new technologies. Whether it is iPads, apps or personal learning environments, modern teachers should  be in constant search of new ICT solutions to implement in their classrooms.

# 9 Social : One of the traditional teaching skills was to be open to questions. The modern teacher shouldlead the conversation to social networks to explore possibilities outside of the class itself. We recommend our “Twitter in the Classroom: Ideas for teachers” to explore this idea in more depth.

# 10 Geek: We mean this in the best sense of the word. The internet is the greatest source of knowledge that humanity has ever known, so to be a modern teacher you must be a curious person and incorporate this resource at every available option. Trust me, your students are going to do it if you don’t! You need to be someone who is always researching and looking for new information to challenge your students and engage them in a dialogue both in class and online.

What is your favourite modern teacher skill? Would you add any others?

Learning Inside the classroom

Learning Inside the classroom 

On last week, I learned all teaching skills from my classmates’ presentation in each group and topic. There are about Teaching Listening, Teaching Speaking, Teaching Reading, Teaching Writing, Teaching with technology and Assessing and testing. In each group explained to clearly, and all teaching skills we can use to practice and teach children in learning English. As follow:

          The first method, Teaching Listening depends on listening. Listening provides the aural input that serves as the basis for language acquisition and enables learners to interact in spoken communication. The important of listening: to make meditation, to help reinforce creative, make to entertainment of imagine and help to develop personality. Besides, there are steps to teaching listening skill: sound words and emphasize sentence, to understanding individual words, identifying and understanding sentence, listening to unfamiliar material and colloquialism or vernacular.

          The second Teaching Speaking, if you have learned a language other than your own, which of the four skills- listening, speaking, reading, or writing – Did you find to be the hardest? Many people feel that speaking in a new language is harder than reading or writing. Speaking happens in real time: usually the person you are talking to is waiting to is waiting for you to speaking right then. When you speak, you cannot edit and revise what you wish to say, as you can if you writing. In addition, the principle for teaching speaking. Be aware of the differences between second language and foreign language learning contexts. Students have very few opportunities to use the target language outside the classroom. A second language context is one where the target language is the language of communication in the society.

          The third Teaching Reading. The need for reading, we all need to be able to read in our own language, whether from books, documents, computers, mobile service, signs or billboards. Students of English need to be able to read these things in English. Reading also helps them to learn and get English. Moreover, reading for comprehension. Teachers use more comprehension for practice reading skill of students. When the students have read a text for the first time, teacher often ask them to read it again and look for more information because it helps to ensure that they have really understood what the read.  As well as, teacher can use language question after students read a text which teachers often ask them to look at a text to find out things about words and phrase.

          Furthermore, Teaching writing. Teaching how to write effectively is one of the most important life-long skills educators impart to their students. When teaching writing, educators must be sure to select resources and support materials that not only aid them in teaching how to write, but that will also be the most effective in helping their students learn to write. Moreover, I recommend a four-step instructional process for teaching writing strategies. The steps are these: (a) Identify a strategy worth teaching . Identifying strategies worth teaching means looking for strategies that will be genuinely helpful. In the case of struggling writers, strategies worth teaching are the ones which will help them overcome their writing difficulties. In our research we have decided that the best way to identify such strategies is by talking with struggling writers, asking them about how they write, what they think about while writing, and what they see as difficulties. Additional insight can be gained by studying student papers to infer where writers are having difficulty and by observing writers at work. (b) Introduce the strategy by modeling it. Introducing strategies by modeling them generally means some form of composing out loud in front of students. Many of the teachers in our studies prefer to do this for groups or whole classes by writing at an overhead projector. They speak their thoughts while writing, calling particular attention to the strategy they are recommending for students. Sometimes they ask students to contribute to the writing the teacher is doing, to copy the writing for themselves, or to compose a similar piece of writing in connection with the writing the teacher is doing. Teachers in our studies also frequently model writing strategies during individual conferences with students. (c) Scaffold students' learning of the strategy.
Scaffolding the learning of a writing strategy means helping students to try the strategy with teacher assistance. This is best done in a writing workshop. The workshop setting is ideal for giving varying degrees of assistance according to individual needs. It is also ideal for conferring with individuals and for setting up partnerships and peer groups so that students can assist each other in the learning of strategies. Even when a writing workshop is not used, some amount of in-class writing with teacher assistance is necessary to make sure that writers practice using the strategy being taught. (d)  Repeated practice and reinforcement. Helping students to work toward independent mastery of the strategy through repeated practice and reinforcement means giving them opportunities to use the strategy many times with decreasing amounts of assistance each time. The idea here is that it is better to teach a few key writing strategies well than it is to teach many of them insufficiently. Students value and master the things we have them do repeatedly. In a way, this gets back to identifying strategies worth teaching -- look for ones that are crucial to writing processes, such as strategies for planning particular types of writing, or for structuring texts certain ways. Then model, practice and repeat.

                Next, Assessing and testing. Students are often assessed and tested to see how well they have done, How well they are doing or how well they perform in standard exam. There are types of assessment: Formative, happens when we test students so that we can help them to do better next time. Summative, testing their knowledge at the end of something. Informal, decide what to do next in a lesson. Diagnostic, we can give diagnostic test at any stage during a course to help us plan future lesson. Placement, test when they first arrive at language teaching institution. Progress, to see how students are getting on. Achievement, at the end of something, such as a semester or a year. And Proficiency, measure a student’s language ability. Besides, there are two types of test item: direct test item and indirect test item.

          The last, Teaching with technology. Teaching with technology can deepen student learning by supporting instructional objectives. However, it can be challenging to select the “best” tech tools while not loosing sight of your goals for student learning.  Once identified, integrating those tools can itself be a challenge albeit an eye-opening experience. The CTL is here to help you (novice, expert, and everyone in between) find creative and constructive ways to integrate technology into your class. If you are looking to flip your class, make use of Canvas, or simply want to experiment with some new instructional technologies, we can help. Technology  refers to advancements in the methods and tools we use to solve problems or achieve a goal. In the classroom, technology can encompass all kinds of tools from low-tech pencil, paper, and chalkboard, to the use of presentation software, or high-tech tablets, online collaboration and conferencing tools, and more. The newest technologies allow us to try things in physical and virtual classrooms that were not possible before. What you use depends fundamentally on what you are trying to accomplish.

          To sum up, all teaching skills are important to use in classroom.  There are rapid developments in teaching that are being driven by social and technological changes. Keeping up to date with these developments within education will pay dividends with improved teaching skills. The skills needed to be a great teacher have now changed; modern teachers need to be competent in many new skill sets that were unknown to their predecessors.