How to Become a Better Teacher (in the eyes of your students)

The teaching profession is unique in several ways. We teachers get to impact the next generation of human beings in our communities, countries and the entire world. But unlike other jobs which are forever at risk of being dump by their customers if they fail to impress, our students are kinda stuck with us for the long haul. Because of this, teachers do not consider impressing our "customers", the students in our class. But if we are going to keep them engaged and genuinely interested in what we have to teach, we have no choice but to learn to impress them.

There is a beautiful quote from author Dale Carnegie which goes like " The only way to make someone do anything, is to make them want to do it". The truth is, if we desire to make our students geniunely interested and excited, we must become better at impressing them. I can remember the frustration in my early days of teaching when my middle school students didn't seem to care about what I got to teach them for the day. Looking back now, I know that I didn't impress them a bit. Over the years however, I learned to impress them which led

them to fall in love literally with my class.

To impress our students or anybody is challeging to put it in a nice way. But the trick is learnable. I will share with you three ways to impress your students by becoming a better teacher.

1. Look beyond the curriculum

With so much content to cover in a short span of time, I wouldn't blame you for strictly staying on track. But our students do not know - or care - about the academic demands our bosses have put on us. All they care about is their experiences in your class. To enhance their experiences in your class, you must make the lesson meaningful and relatable to their lives by going beyond what's in the curriculum. When planning my lessons, I always look for ways I can make the lesson a little more practical and real for my students. I spend a couple of hours googling ideas and activities to achieve this aim. Over time, I started to create and improve upon my own ideas as well as use strategies from other teachers.

2. Provide support during class

No matter how well we prepare our lessons, reality seems to get in the way during the actual lesson. Some of our students look on confused while others struggle to follow what we think was a clear instruction. This is a common experience for even the best teachers. The way around it is to be patient with your students and yourself. Prior to class, it is important to anticipate areas where your students may struggle and accordingly prepare specific things you will do to address them when they occur. Such support makes you look unique in your students' eyes. They see you as caring and they will want to study with you. Simple things like writing the definitions of difficult words for students to refer to during activities can transform how your students see you. I always make it a point to go the extra mile to provide relevant support to my students. I usually walk around during group work to chat with them and help them organize their thinking through careful questioning. I make sure I don't provide every thing they need but only enough to guide them discover the answers.

3. Be genuinely interested in them

Our own drama seem too much to deal with let alone take interest in our students. I don't mean super interested but surface level interested. Although our primary goal is to teach students the lessons for the day, we can't ignore the fact that students are human beings. Their lives extend outside our classroom and it's important to take genuine notice of what individual students are up to outside of class. Through small talks prior to class, you can get to know what's going on in their lives. And I will caution you to ALWAYS keep it surface level. I get to know extra things about my students that most of my colleagues do not. One time a student revealed to me she had a back pain and would be having a surgery that month during a small talk in class. This gave me the opportunity to ask a few more questions about how she was feeling and gave her some words of encouragement. After several weeks, I reminded myself to ask her how her situation was now. Such actions make us stand out in the eyes of our students.

And of course there are more ways to look amazing in your students' eyes but these are my top three which I wanted to share with you. I know the life of a teacher isn't easy but we all will agree it is worthwhile. Hopefully this brief article will inspire you keep going, keep learning and keep making impact in your students' lives.

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SUMMARY AND KEY TAKE AWAYS

1. To get our students to do what we want them to do, teachers must impress students by becoming a better teacher.

2. By making the lesson more relatable to their lives, students' experiences in the class are enhanced which leads to positive feeling towards their teacher.

3. Anticipating areas in the lesson where students may struggle and providing relevant support, students will view their teacher as caring and therefore be impressed by such actions.

4. Lastly, showing genuine "surface level" interest in students' lives and finding out what they are up to through small talk in class can make the teacher look unique in a student's eyes.