To Be an Effective Classroom Teacher

To be effective, a teacher must be sensitive to the diversity of students and learning styles; have the ability to develop and maintain rapport; and have a teaching philosophy that serves as the foundation for classroom management, instruction, and assessment. Students have diverse backgrounds and individual learning styles, and so it is important that a teacher understand each student. This in turn enables the teacher to create relevant lessons and authentic assessment strategies. Essentially, the teacher must be able to relate to and understand students. Understanding students is also the key to developing and maintaining rapport, which is vital to creating an atmosphere of respect and trust within the classroom and between the teacher and student. Stephen Covey, a writer and speaker on the subject of effectiveness, has as one of his habits of highly effective people, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” This habit is at the core of my teaching philosophy. It is important to fully understand your own teaching philosophy in order to maintain a strong foundation upon which to base pedagogical choices. The integrity of each lesson, student-teacher interaction, and assessment tool depends on how well the teacher understands and implements strategies that are directly based on his/her philosophy of education. I believe, for example, in promoting and facilitating a mastery approach to learning. Because of this, classroom management issues, such as absenteeism for example, can be discussed with a mastery approach to learning as the basis for explaining how absenteeism has a negative effect on the outcome of student learning. There are a plethora of skills and attributes that are necessary to be an effective classroom teacher and all of them are connected in some way to being sensitive to diversity, maintaining rapport, and teaching from a philosophical foundation.