Sunday, May 17, 2009

How to Become a Confident Teacher By Trevor Johnson

Teaching is a very noble profession. Not all people in the world are talented enough to share their knowledge with others. Hence, we need teachers to do the job for us. However, this job is not as easy as it sounds. In order to do justice to the teaching profession, a teacher needs to be confident. It is important to know that confident teachers are not born, they are made. In this article, we shall talk about how to become a confident teacher.

Firstly, in order to be a confident teacher, you need to be versatile in your choice of subject. You can expect to teach science impeccably, if you have a background in politics. Hence, you need to possess the right knowledge. Also, you need to keep yourself updated of the changes in your field of expertise as and when they keep happening. The fact that you have a thorough understanding of your subject and have the knowledge to answer all the questions that come up will make you a confident teacher.

The next point that you need to keep in mind to become a confident teacher is the way you conduct yourself in front of your students. A child learns from what it sees and as a teacher you are a role model to your students and they imbibe what you do and what you practice. Hence, you need to be an epitome of discipline and perfection. This will also inculcate respect for the students. Also, your peers will begin to look up to you for suggestions. This is another factor that will make you a confident teacher.

Bias is a word that should not exist in your dictionary if you are a teacher. A teacher should be impartial towards all her students. He/she should be just in her role of teaching. A biased teacher can never do deliver 100% in his/her role. This is because at the back of their mind they will always have a persistent guilt factor because they are partial to some student. Hence, to be a confident teacher, you should learn to be unbiased and treat everyone equally.

Friday, May 15, 2009

Effective Teaching and Learning Strategies By D Meetoo

Here are some of the teaching strategies a teacher should use in his class

· Cooperative learning or group work
· Discovery or guided discovery learning/ Active learning
· Expository learning
· Brainstorming
· Demonstration method
· Mind mapping
· Role play
· Differentiation
· Cooperative learning or Group work

The group method or cooperative learning is thought of as one teacher engaging a small group of students in discussion. Students work together and interact in a task -related way with each other. One or some of the students help those who need or ask for help. Tasks and duties are also shared in the group.

Cooperative learning refers to a set of instructional methods in which students work in small, mixed ability learning group. The group has usually has four to six members, with high flyer, average achievers and achievers. The students in each group are responsible not only for learning material being taught in class, but also for helping their group mates learn.

Pupils learn by discovering things by themselves. It is an example of active learning in its "pure form". Jerome Bruner believes that pupils must identify key principles by themselves rather than simply accepting teacher's explanations.

In Discovery learning, the teacher presents examples and the students work with the examples until they discover the interrelationships. Guided discovery is the use of a structural framework in which learning can occur. The student is given the problem and directed towards the solution as in the case of work cards, project work, etc.

It is the method facts, concepts, principles, relationships and generalization are described by the teacher or printed in the textbook with a view to pupils understanding and assimilating them. It consists of lectures, presentation, narrative and textbook method.


The Information Age and the Need For Health and Education Indicators By Sam Miller

In this modern Information Age, the global nature of interactions and economies have put a premium on knowledge; and hence education. Today, knowledge and human or intellectual capital is widely recognized to be one of the important factors, if not the most important one, in economic development and production. This means that a greater premium is put now more than ever on investments in both health and education, which serve to improve the workforce and further unlock human potential. To this end, many people aim to find a health and education indicator or indicators to help gauge progress towards improving these aspects of society and government.

In fact, just taking a good look around will show that nothing is causing as much change, both upheaval and innovation, in academic and business institutions as the redefinition of intellectual and human capital. Continuing developments in information technology, new media, and their accompanying shifts in mindsets and ways of thinking are increasingly putting emphasis on human knowledge bases. That is, as most online businesses and electronic commerce organizations have found out, the company cannot ever claim to "own" those skills, information, and expertise that live in the minds of its employees. This is why more and more people are beginning to realize the need for a good educational system, if a country's workforce is to remain globally competitive. Employers value the proper training and competence that only a proper education can give. Politicians are now running on platforms that heavily stress schooling and education, and voters show their sympathy.

However, as is true with almost all significant change, this paradigm shift has not yet been reflected fully. For instance, in the gross domestic product or GDP of the United States, costs incurred in the pursuit of education still count as expenditures instead of the investments in capital - human capital - that they are. In the future, as the new wave of the information age continues to swell, it is expected that proper importance and regard would be given to education.

Putting a set of indicators together to accurately gauge the state of an educational system should take into account many different factors. First, some overall measures should be taken in order to assess the general efficiency of the system. These might consist of the absolute and relative percentages of the population at various academic stages, for instance. This may then be correlated with each tier's economic impact in order to get a general idea of the effects of the educational system on the national and global economy.

Next, the more specific aspects of the workings of the school system could be probed using more particular measures and indicators. These would then investigate the effects of education on the various demographic groups, and hence assess its relative efficiencies. The prime or most relevant education indicator would vary from country to country, depending heavily on its level of development. Basic education, for example, would be most important to developing countries, because it forms the fundamental step on which succeeding parts would need to build.

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