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TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
6 Essential Teaching Skills You Need
30 January 2022/ By Zineb DJOUB
Teaching is not only a matter of mastering a given subject and having certain qualities such as self-confidence, passion, and enthusiasm. But, it’s also about abilities or skills to optimize students’ learning achievement. Indeed, effective teaching depends to a larger extent on actual practice or what goes inside the classroom. So, teaching skills remain a key determinant of the learning outcomes.
Therefore, as educators, we should know what teaching skills to hone to grow further in teaching, regardless of our teaching qualifications and experience.
To sustain teacher development, here are 6 effective teaching skills every teacher needs in the profession.
1. Pedagogical skills
Besides having pedagogical knowledge (teaching approaches and methods, assessment principles, etc.), it’s also important to put such knowledge effectively into practice.
So, pedagogical skills relate to those actions you undertake to support your students to learn from assessing students’ prior knowledge and providing instructions and practice to checking for understanding, monitoring students’ progress, and giving feedback.
But what do pedagogical skills include?
In teaching, we carry on different tasks daily. Those teaching-learning-related practices vary according to our teaching objectives and students’ learning needs. Yet, achieving these tasks requires certain skills to optimize their full potential and support students’ learning.
Therefore, pedagogical skills refer to a broad process that includes a set of skills pre-requisite for effective teaching. These are:
Explanatory skills
- Communicating objectives of the lesson/task (what’s expected of students and why);
- providing a simple, explicit, and clear explanation of the content using visual aids, illustrations, and calling upon peer teaching;
- clarifying tasks’ instructions, assessment criteria, and feedback.
Questioning skills
- Using well-chosen questions to engage, challenge, and consolidate understanding;
- prompting students to address questions, reflect on their peer’s questions and generate answers;
- giving students sufficient time to reflect on the questions addressed;
- responding positively to students’ answers.
Classroom management skills
- Well-established lessons (the lesson moves smoothly, the pace is brisk and activities are varied);
- productive use of instructional time. Control is established by involving students in learning;
- well-established classroom routines through clarifying expectations, facilitating and guiding good conduct;
- positive classroom climate, through providing social support for students’ learning.
Decision-making skills
- Identifying students’ needs and adapting instruction accordingly;
- planning lessons that engage students’ interest, intellect, or creativity using a range of activities, resources, and interactions;
- planning for the unexpected, anticipating problems, and suggesting solutions;
- deciding on instructional materials and how to devote more time to practices that clarify and reinforce understanding of the content;
- reflecting on teaching through ongoing classroom observations, student feedback, and refining further instruction.
Assessment skills
- Effective assessment for learning using an appropriate range of teacher assessment techniques;
- offering informative feedback; indicating clearly what has been done and when improvement is needed;
- checking for students’ understanding;
- preparing students for exams.
Pedagogical skills are so important. They differentiate effective teachers from non-effective ones. So, it’s so important to develop or refine them.
Taking part in PD programmes, reading books about teaching, and also through trials and errors and reflecting on your experience you can achieve that. So, reflect on which skills (explanatory, classroom management, assessment, etc.) you need to focus on for effective pedagogy.
2. Interpersonal skills
Pedagogical skills are necessary for effective instruction. Yet, students’ learning achievement depends also on the quality of classroom interaction taking place.
Coming up with an effective lesson plan with varied tasks, and materials that cater to different needs is important, but it may not be sufficient in the absence of effective interaction.
Whether it’s verbal or non-verbal, communication remains the key element to imparting knowledge, reaching out to all students, understanding them as individuals, and supporting them to learn better.
Besides, with effective language, interesting intonation, and behaviour movement, you can also maintain students’ attention and captivate their interest throughout the lesson.
Therefore, interpersonal skills are necessary to interact effectively with students. These skills allow us to communicate effectively and interact with individual students and groups.
So, when you have interpersonal skills you’ll build more connections with students, easily determine the necessary pathway to their success, and sustain their interest along the process.
Interpersonal skills can also help you erase misunderstandings, and avoid conflicts or behaviour problems from escalating in the classroom. Because they make you more intentional about your words and gestures. So, you know how you should address your students.
In teaching, we also interact with parents, colleagues, and administrators. Collaborating with them is an essential tool to help our students learn.
So, without good interpersonal skills, you may find it difficult to communicate effectively with these people, collaborate, and create worthwhile relationships. To improve your interpersonal skills check out these post:11 Ways To Improve Your Interpersonal Skills
3. Intrapersonal skills
Teaching is an emotionally charged process. It can often leave us feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, and stressed out. Yet, the way we see the “self” and handle our emotions, thoughts, and desires can affect our relationships with students and others, our productivity, and our well-being.
So, staying productive and self-motivated may seem hard in front of the unexpected and setbacks.
Therefore, to thrive in teaching, it’s necessary to develop intrapersonal skills, those internal abilities, and behaviours that help us manage our emotions, cope with challenges, be self-motivated, and make proper decisions to develop as teachers.
To develop intrapersonal skills, we should address our emotional states and oppressive thoughts using self-regulation.
Emotional self-regulation is a powerful tool not only to control your emotions but also to interrupt the negative voice that makes you feel and act in a way that is completely different from who you are.
To learn more about the process of self-regulation check out this post:
Besides self-regulation, self-caring is another way to reenergize, stay focused, and keep going in the face of the various bumps.
So, incorporate self-care into your daily routines and remember that your physical and mental health are the most important ingredients for professional and personal growth.
4. Organizational skills
Our professional and personal life as educators is crammed with a lot of priorities and responsibilities. Indeed, teaching requires more preparation, reflection, flexibility, and adaptability to bring the necessary change. The need to switch to hybrid learning due to the pandemic proves how challenging teaching is.
So, if we lack organization, we’ll never be able to create the necessary work-life balance. Instead, we’ll beat ourselves up for not doing the tasks and end up burning out.
To that end, organizational skills are so important to minimize stress and get things done. They allow you to manage your time, organize your home, and workspace, and accomplish all assigned tasks.
So, these skills are necessary for both your personal and professional life.
Since your personal life affects your teaching, organizing your house and time is a must. There need to be certain routines to bring this organization into practice: creating to-do lists, organizing housework over the week, etc.
Think about or adopt an organization system that allows you to stay organized and fulfill your goals while also having some time for self-care. Use it with more flexibility to facilitate accomplishing more important tasks within the set deadlines.
At the workplace, organization involves managing time well. This is the number one issue for many teachers and the main reason for having them feel stressed.
Time management is in fact what makes us dread bringing change and innovative ideas into our classes, simply because we think we barely have time for the things we’re asked to do.
For this purpose, we should alter our conception of the notion of time. We should consider it as an important tool we can manipulate to maximize learning rather than a setback that limits our decisions and opportunities for students’ engagement.
So, while planning your lessons think about prioritizing and focusing on the most important tasks/activities for your students while discarding or devoting less time to the rest. Think about your goals and do a few things that matter to your students’ learning.
Having clear intentions and using proactive classroom management can also support you to make students focused, thereby preventing distractions and downtime.
In addition, keeping your classroom (library, materials, furniture, etc.) organized can help in managing time. Because you’ll have everything in place so that you and your students can easily access it.
Therefore, when designing your lesson plan and timing your tasks think also about the physical space. Does that lesson require a certain special organization (layout of furniture for particular interactions)?
In case this is required you need to consider how you should do that in a way that helps you save your time and avoid distractions.
Your organizational skills develop through consistently making decisions, setting goals, reflecting on teaching, and your commitment to being a better-organized teacher.
5. Technology skills
As technology evolves increasingly, more educational apps, devices, and resources are being created for teachers and students.
Various tech tools can help teachers provide richer content, a better learning experience, and flexibility.
So, to keep pace with that technological progress and facilitate students’ learning through educational technologies, we need to develop or improve our technology skills (also called technical skills).
These skills are the necessary abilities to interact and use certain tasks such as creating, editing, and managing digital audio, producing, editing, and sharing videos (for online learning), creating a virtual space for the classroom, checking for understanding online using quizzes and polls, checking for plagiarism, etc.
The kind of technical skills you need to develop or refine further depends on your teaching context: teaching objectives and students’ learning needs. So, you can read technical books/magazines, watch tutorials on YouTube, take online classes, connect with teachers or tech experts who can help, etc.
6. Critical thinking and creativity skills
Do teachers need to be critical thinkers and creative in teaching?
Definitely, YES!
Because teaching is a challenging job. Critical thinking skills help us see the world around us with an open mind, far from judgments and illusions.
These are the tools to observe things more critically, analyze facts/issues, and seek out the truth that may not be visible for everyone.
So, critical thinking skills help us deal with day-to-day issues, minimize stress more effectively, and make proper decisions to achieve our goals. To this end, keep on reflecting on your teaching. This is what makes you a CRITICAL THINKER!
Since monotony and boredom can kill our passion for teaching and drive students away, creativity skills are also necessary teaching skills.
Indeed, when you teach with creativity you’ll bring joy, surprise, mindfulness, and liven up your class. You prompt students to think, imagine, challenge themselves, share ideas, and produce.
However, creativity doesn’t always necessitate planning to bring new or unfamiliar ideas into your classes. You can be creative to handle unpredictable moments, being spontaneous and improvising. This can help you turn those moments into learning opportunities.
So, creativity requires risk and an open mind to push yourself out of your comfort zone, think out of the box, and try out those ideas with your students.
To learn more about how to be creative in teaching, read 101 Way for Teachers to be more Creative.
These are the most important teaching skills for all of us. As the world is changing and new demands are emerging we should keep honing our teaching skills. This is what makes us grow and thrive in teaching.
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