How does good teaching influence students to learn better ? What is Good Teaching? Good teaching includes all the techniques and ways a teacher use to get the message through the students in a way the student feels interconnected with the teacher and makes them feel like they are on the same page. Teaching is about engaging students or keeping your students interested. So if you like reading you will transmit that to your classmates in a way they will feel engaged with what they reading. If you engage students to their reading they will definitely understand better the lesson, so that is the main point for teachers how to do that, how to maintain your students engage to class. Good teaching demands engagement first from the teacher and then from the student. When that happens we have a good learning. Because if teacher nor student are engaged with the class, books, texts, so the learning will be poor. So that is when the real job of a teacher begins, you have to explore first the environment of your classmates, get to know what they like the most so you know what they will feel interested for.
Sometimes there will be occasions when students wont like what you have to teach for that day, or the topic itself but what if that topic is part of arequirement for the class? what you have to do is make it the more interesting possible, look for other ways for teaching the topic that will make it easier for students. When I was teaching first grade 4 months ago, I would use the adequate voice intonation and act out the reading for them, as you know children from 5 to 7 years will definitely feel interested in things like that. That caught the attention even of those who were distracted. I think that really worked because you get to characterize the moment, they feel like it is really happening, since they have good imagination that definitely worked. I know that because kids from that age are usually attracted to cartoons and stuff like that so they felt a good connection of humor and class. In that way that would help them to understand what was going on in the story and would comprehend better.
The reading books the students have have help a lot because these are books that have many pictures so that works best for children in that age. These books were bought by the school, we as teachers had a meeting before classes began to decide if the reading book was of our approval, which it was because it was a ver interacting set of books, it includes various activities for us to engage our students with the reading. Also, we used Story Cards which are cards that have only the pictures of the events of the story and we would developed a conversation based on the pictures, kind of like a summary based on pictures so that they would get involved with the characters and all the events.It became engaging because it helped them learn their way, playing, looking at pictures not only reading or writing. What we often did in class was like bring to life the characters of the story. One time we were reading about animals in the jungle so for homework they had to bring to class a mask of any animal of the story, so next they when we began reading i would make them make the sound of the animal they were representing. In that way they really felt excited about the story. They were feeling they were in their environment many games, fun, etc. so they actually learn by doing what they like the most.
There was this other time when I was talking to the parents in a teacher-parent session and I was telling the parents they need to encourage their children to read at home, because we will have exams every week to check the fluency of the student. So one parent told me "Oh yes my son is always telling me to buy new books because he says his teacher told him he needs to read books at home, and I think that is good that you as teacher motivate our children to read more". I really felt like I was accomplishing my goal because children will always do what their teacher tell them to do. So if I will influence them to read more at home they will do so, because when they are at that age they really respect the teacher and they feel like the teacher is a really important person in their lives. So I think that the engaging part is really working out in here, since it is important that students feel motivated about reading so I am like the source of their reading and writing knowledge. And that is a huge part in a students life to feel motivated and really liking what we are doing in class.
I had in my class a really smart kid that he would immediately understand what the story was about and he once came next to my desk and asked” Ms. Do you have to read all the books from school to explain the topics to us? And I answered “Yes I have to do a lot of reading” and then he said back “ Ms. So that means you really like reading, just like me!” I felt he really felt identified with me and that was like an inspiration for him to continue reading. I really love when I think about this moment because I feel like wow I was like his role model, so if I like reading he will do it also. So for me that is engaging, I connect him with reading and writing. Influence, identification and engagement are all interconnected, this are the keys for good teaching. One without the other will give a bad result in teaching.
We need to find a way to get students to like what they are doing in class and not to feel bored, because if that happens we fail as teachers. When a student is bored no information will get into his brain, contrary if the student is engaged with the reading or really into the class it wont even be necessary for a student to study too much for a test because they would remember almost everything (or at least important details) of the lesson. We are the responsible for that connection, we determine the way our students perceive a class. So it is really challenging to do that because not all of them are interested in the same things or some like to do things in a different way than others, etc.
So this is my theory which shows that your experience of reading can affect/ influence others because in that age specially first graders you can start building their reading attraction.
I made have a picture collage of students doing different activities in which they are rewarded because they met the reading goal of the month, which was for example to read 200 words in 2 minutes and so on. They really feel extra happy when they know they get rewarded because they did something good. What is going to happen is that they will do that over and over again so that they can be rewarded with different things, so what they will achieve will be a perfect fluency and a total comprehension of the lesson.
I think this project is for students so that they realize the importance of reading in their lives and how good teaching will definitely live a mark in their experiences.
No comments:
Post a Comment