Teach English in Zengduquxinxinggongyejidi - Suizhou Shi

Writing instructional objectives is a basic planning skill. By specifying instructional objectives, teachers define their purposes in terms that are clear and understandable. Well-written instructional objectives enable teachers to plan and implement their instructional strategies. Therefore , the success of teachers’ implementation skills greatly depends on the thoughtfulness and clarity of their instructional objectives. Furthermore, Planning is perhaps the most important function a teacher performs. Expert teachers establish and effectively use routines such as collecting homework, distributing materials, and calling on students. They also have repertoires of alternative routines and procedures to use for different situations. Instead of having only one way of accomplishing an objective, expert teachers plan for and execute different procedures as needed. Moreover , research has shown that involving students in learning plays a significant role for teaching skills in the classroom.Robert Shostak presents three basic skills for involving students in learning—planned beginnings, planned discussions, and planned endings—that research studies have demonstrated to be important components of engaging students in learning. Planned beginnings refers to teacher-initiated actions or statements that are designed to establish a communicative link between the experiences of students and the objectives of the lesson. Planned discussions encourage students to acquire new knowledge, reflect on ideas different from their own, and to share personal opinions. Planned endings refers to actions or statements designed to bring a lesson to an appropriate conclusion and to consolidate student learning. The effective use of these three skills will help establish and maintain student interest in the lesson, and will ensure that the main part of the lesson has been learned. Questioning also marks as one of the important teaching skills in the classroom. most educators agree that questioning strategies and techniques are key tools in the teacher’s repertoire of interactive teaching skills. Questioning provides opportunities to classify and construct questions according to the six levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy; to identify the seven habits of effective questioners; to explore the related areas of wait time, probing, scaffolding, and feedback that can enhance questioning skills; and to explore how the growing diversity and multicultural nature of America’s students affect questioning strategies. If the skills presented in this chapter are utilized in teaching, the net effect will be students who are more active participants in the learning process. To teach all students in a class effectively, a teacher must take into account the variety of ways in which students differ from one another, and offer instruction that responds to this variety. Differentiated instruction is teaching with student variance in mind. As Carol Ann Tomlinson, writes, “. . . differentiated instruction is ‘responsive’ teaching rather than ‘one-size-fits-all’ teaching.” In this highly interactive chapter, Tomlinson helps the reader develop a personal rationale for teaching to address learner needs; provides specific ways to differentiate content, activities, and products in response to student readiness, interest, and learning profi le; and helps the reader think about practical ways to become a responsive teacher. Effective teachers can work with students of diverse backgrounds to affirm their identities and build upon who the students are and what they bring with them to school. Jason Irizarry provides a conceptual basis for why culturally responsive teaching is so important, as well as providing general strategies to make teaching more culturally responsive. He also emphasizes the need for teachers to become more in touch with their own cultural identities before they can appreciate and work with the cultural identities of their students.Classroom management skills are necessary for effective teaching to occur, but they do not guarantee such behavior. Weinstein and Weber examine three different philosophical positions regarding classroom management—authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive approaches—and provide numerous opportunities for diagnosing classroom situations accord- ing to each of these three viewpoints. They also address the issue of culturally responsive classroom management, and identify the ongoing tasks needed for effective classroom management.Reflective teaching is a teacher’s habit of examining and evaluating his or her teaching on a regular basis. Using the skills related to observa- tion, analysis, interpretation, and decision making, reflective practitioners are able to inquire into teaching and to think critically about their work. Reflection typically includes reconstructing an experience, making con- nections to prior knowledge or skills, examining the thoughts and under- standings that undergird our teaching, and making decisions about how to apply the knowledge or skills in a new situation. Walter Doyle identifies the knowledge base for reflective practitioners as including personal knowl- edge, craft knowledge of skilled practitioners, and propositional knowledge from classroom research and from the social and behavioral sciences.11 According to Doyle, theoretical and empirical knowledge, along with teaching skills, are embedded in a conceptual framework that permits the teacher to deliberate about teaching problems and practices. Instead of blindly following rules and prescriptions that are derived from research, reflective practitioners use this theoretical and empirical knowledge, along with knowledge about themselves and craft knowledge derived from skilled teachers, to arrive at decisions that make sense to them given the particu- larities related to their students and their learning environment. Reflec- tion is the process by which teachers continue to learn and improve their teaching.