How people see Teachers and Teaching

Just the other day, I had the weirdest experience ever. We were all gathered on the dinner table with people coming over and they started asking how everybody was doing, and when it came to me my response was always "Fine". The next question would always be"What are you planning to do?" and here's my "SIN" for saying "I'm Planning to start teaching". And then people would rush to judge and babble about how bad teaching is. As a matter of fact, I was one of those people until recently I started observing those who teach, us and other students as well. Teachers put all their efforts so that their students are doing well. Without the teacher there would be no engineer, no doctor, no banker, no financing agents, no nurses, without the teacher people may be literate, but they would never be educated. This is what makes teaching vital: No world can exist without education, we can relate that to teaching being the first- and only profession- in ancient Rome, Greece, and Europe, moreover, In the Arab world their analogy for teachers are prophets, the highest rank possible for humans; yet, People still manage to put down every teacher they come across. We must always ask ourselves and other people: On what basis are teachers being underestimated?, and what is it that makes other jobs much more appealing?
Maybe it's the system, and maybe it's us, so before we point fingers we must be certain that we are giving teaching as a profession,the huge responsibility that comes with it, and with this responsibility lies our right to be viewed as somebody who matters, and somebody who does make a difference.

Using Taxonomies

In previous posts we have discussed that targets, also known as objectives, must be based on different levels of thinking. Where does a teacher inspire these targets from? and what are the taxonomies used to define each level of thinking? The answers to these questions emphasizes the importance of knowing taxonomies even before building the targets accordingly.
Taxonomies are classifications that allow us to formulate distinction between a set of classes or groups, must taxonomies have different criteria for classifying levels and categories of words and specifications. One effective and most common taxonomy is Bloom's taxonomy, in this taxonomy there are different levels of thinking starting from low levels like knowledge and understanding, to higher levels like analysis and evaluation. Teachers must be knowledgeable of the levels to allow students experience different thinking steps to arrive at a better understanding and develop skills related to critical thinking.
Teachers must know that these steps are not in a staircase form and that it doesn't require one level to move to the next level, however, there are basic levels to ensure movement to higher ones.

What shapes a good teacher?

What is the definition of a good teacher, how do students see the good teacher, and what are the top things that first pop in their minds when you say: “here’s a good teacher”… all of these are questions researchers have been attempting to answer for so long, but there was no clear unique single definition to what makes a teacher good enough, what they were able to get was a group of characteristics that are found in almost every good teacher. These characteristics include: having a good personality, cares about their students and their learning. Teachers should also be knowledgeable; when teachers have this trait, students tend to respect them more and focus more because they want to get their share from the teacher’s knowledge and from this respect teachers can force their students to be disciplined and to behave by certain rules they set in the classroom. Teachers must also be supportive, i.e. they should be able to help their students whenever they need them, and to have faith that they are able to accomplish the tasks required, last but not least, teachers should have different communication skills that allow them to reach their students the best, and finally teachers should promote creativity, help students to explore the world in their own way, and at last they should listen at all times to their students and make them feel that whatever they say is valued in the classroom, this will increase student’s involvement and decreases the chance of having them as management issues.

What teaching strategy to use?

The teachers strategies that are used in the classroom are the primary tool that causes students to fail or make it, if the strategy you are using with your students is appropriate to the learning situation your students will make the most of the opportunity given to them, and on the contrary if the strategy fails to serve the main purpose of teaching then your students are going to fail you and you will fail yourself, so how does an effective teacher pick the proper strategy and is the strategy picked appropriate at all times? There are different strategies to use with different content, and a teacher must be knowledgeable of these strategies and the best time to use each one. Questioning is one of the best strategies to be used with different content and adapt it to different students, after all it’s the teacher’s job is to promote students to think and to drive them to experience the learning process, by allowing them to discover things on their own, this helps the students to develop thinking skills and to transfer the knowledge to relate it to their real lives. Nonetheless, teachers should know different strategies and continuously improve their repertoire of knowledge.

What kind of students you have in your classes?

Teachers in the classroom have different interpretations for students and the way they behave around students is mainly based on different expectations that clouds the teacher’s clear judgment for his or her students, if a student that the teacher “believes” is a smart student she automatically changes her actions and behaviors around that student, and the same is for students who are seen as incapable or seem like they have don’t potential in them. The question is that how did the teacher spot the brilliance in the first student and what made her believe that he’s smart, maybe he has nerd glasses, maybe he doesn’t interact with others, maybe he does all the tasks quicker than his classmates, or maybe he just looks smart. How is the student in the second case categorized with the low achievers? Maybe he just doesn’t look that smart, maybe the teacher just doesn’t like him, maybe his friends don’t like him so they set rumors on him, and maybe he comes from poor family so he’s not seen as smart. Without us even knowing it we label students: the pretty, the funny, the smart, the nerd, the stupid one, the quit one, the trouble maker, but what if our students are all those people together in a package, we might not like it but it’s our job to remove those labels from the classroom and categorize our students only according to their efforts, and only for the purpose of differentiating instructions according to the needs of each student.