Still Finding My Way to Effective Teaching...

I have been teaching for thirty years, YES 30 years!. I sure could have retired after my twenty-fifth year if I had had the right age to do so, but myself, like many educators either start our careers at a very young age, or the system makes us work longer than we should. I am not complaining, I am just talking about my particular case, so here I am, still thinking what my most effective teaching method is.

The truth is that there is no magic effective method: we, educators, should be capable to handle situations that are much more different or difficult from those we faced before. Why? Because since I started teaching in the late 1980´s, he world has changed for the better or worse, positively or negatively. Now children are exposed to social media, they obviously have absolute access to ubiquitous data and any type of information that differ immensely from the one that those in the previous decades had. What does that mean? We obviously cannot think of teaching the same kind of students we had taught before that is why I am still wondering what I can do to cater for the needs of my students because I care. I always have. Did I need these 30 years to realize that? May be but there was one video I recently watched: The Power Of A Caring Educator which opened my eyes and made me realized, believe it or not after such a long time, that I have been doing the right thing all along my teaching career.

Is it the caring teacher always the one who succeeds, whose teaching reaches every soul in the classroom, touches many lives and makes an impact on more than one student? Yes to all!.

That same caring educator has to be open to changes, be brave enough to take risks and leadership roles, learn from mistakes and be fully supported by the school administrators, among others. That same good, caring educator can always become a great one. One of the secrets is to think like a child and act as an adult by building relationships and making connections. If teachers combine all these strategies together with the pursuit of the many paths they can follow to find the proper teaching methodology, the result can be magnificent. I have found an interesting article on one of my favorite websites, Edutopia, which talks about the habits that lead to effective teaching. 

There were three posts on social media that inspired and motivated me to write this post. The first one was Lead Like A Pirate by Shelley Burgess and Beth Houf :

The second was a very creative, interesting video by Larry Ferlazzo who recently posted Differentiating Instruction: It’s Not as Hard as You Think. That is what I mostly do. Also as a language teacher, I was extremely motivated with this graphic containing TESOL´s 6 Principles for Exemplary Teaching of Language Learners. Amazing!:

As we know, there are many inspiring educators, passion promoters and gardeners trying to plant the seed of curiosity doing wonderful things in their classes, so we have a mission to find them and make their voices heard. 

Besides, I was once told sport coaches have a special language to talk to their players, very special words of encouragement so I decided to look for some that sums up mostly all my message in this post.