This refers to teachers who are fully dedicated to education and aim to improve all aspects of education. The skills required to be an active teacher involve more than just prowess in an academic field. Although there’re many different ways to teach effectively, active teachers have several qualities in common. They’re able to adjust their teaching strategies to fit both the material and the students, recognizing that different pupils learn in different ways.
Some top qualities of active teachers include:
Positive: Active teachers should keep their students engaged with a positive attitude. Teaching is most successful when pupils are motivated by the desire to learn instead of by degree requirements or grades. Teachers should remain enthusiastic and allow students to see what’s interesting about their subjects.
Prepared: Active teachers should know the course material. They need to review the key ideas and concepts if they’re unclear about them, particularly if it has been some time since they’ve worked with the topics they’ll be teaching. They should think about how the learning material can be most effectively illustrated and design a strategy. They need to take notes or write an outline to follow during a lecture and prepare their handouts, diagrams, and other aids well in advance.
Organized: Teachers job is to illustrate main points and important context to help learners integrate all of their work for the course. Given that there’s never time to teach everything, active teachers should choose the most important concepts and show students how they’re related. They should explain ideas so students can build on materials they’ve already mastered. They need to show students that what they’re learning now is related to material covered later in the course.
Clear: Active teachers can explain complicated ideas in simple ways. As teachers develop expertise in an academic field, it’s easy to forget that learners may have no prior knowledge of the basic concepts they take for granted. Active teachers should help students comprehend and use new terminology to achieve fluency in the language of their discipline.
Active: Active teachers should keep their students thinking. Unless students actively use the concepts teachers teach, most students will remember just a small fraction of what they learn. A lecture is an effective method to deliver information to a large audience, but it’s ineffective to provide the learners with lasting knowledge and skills. Active teachers should consider some classroom time for activities other than traditional discussions, lectures, or question and answer sessions.
