Leaving a lasting positive impact on your students, seeing them improve their learning, and witnessing their progress can be truly satisfying for any loving teacher. While a great deal of responsibility may fall on your students to learn and apply what you teach them, a bigger chunk of the work lies with you as the teacher to make learning easier for your students. So are your students struggling to keep up with you in class? The following tips can help make learning easier for them.
Watch how you treat your students— it matters
How you treat your students or what you say to them matters more than you may think. Almost everyone can recollect some words their primary school teacher said to them and how it affected their learning even through adulthood. So, regardless of how you feel when you enter your classroom or the stress weighing on your shoulders, be careful of your choice of words, especially the ones born out of emotion. Aim to inspire and positively uplift your students as much as you can. That’s because those little ones may forget what you teach them, but they’ll always remember how you treated them.
Feedback is crucial
The last thing you want to do is go ahead with your lessons, wrap up, and convince yourself it’s been a good day. Getting feedback from your students is vital, as it helps you teach them better and help them understand even better. You can use several techniques to solicit the feedback you need. These include avoiding closed questions, creating a welcoming environment, and looping back to your students.
Don’t only say what to do, show how to it
After you tell your students what to do, it’s important to show them how to do it. Even if you’ve provided pretty clear guidelines on how to do a particular assignment, it helps immensely to model just how you want them to complete that assignment. This strategy will prove particularly helpful for kids who are visual learners.
Know your subject
According to a Sutton Trust report (which looked at more than 200 research pieces), subject knowledge is one of the six most important elements of great teaching. While this may sound pretty obvious, the report highlighted that the best teachers have a great deal of subject knowledge. But it doesn’t end there; if subject knowledge is below a certain level, it usually significantly impacts a child’s ability to grasp or learn that subject.
Make teaching fun
Try working a great sense of humor into your teaching (of course, humor your kids can appreciate), as that positively impacts their ability to learn quickly. You probably had an always-serious teacher you remember with not-so-fond memories growing up. And you know how badly you wanted to avoid sitting through their lessons.
But making the class fun isn’t always about humor. Today’s kids love technology, and you can also take advantage of various tech solutions to help your kids with things like learning digital skills during school while making it easier for them to understand your lessons.
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