WAYS BY WHICH TEACHERS CAN REDUCE THEIR WORKLOAD IN THE CLASSROOM

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Many teachers seem to be under pressure at work due to their job requirements. They look weak and tired at the end of the day because they want to fulfill their part of the agreement as teachers/facilitators. It appears that most teachers see the profession as a call to serve God and Mankind hence will go the extra mile to perform their responsibilities. Aside from all these beliefs, teachers must know that the human system may not be stretched beyond its capacity. Therefore, there is the need to put the necessary measures in place to reduce the workload in the classroom. The following are the ways by which teachers can save their energies in the classroom:

Firstly, plan your term or semester. Aside from the scheme of work and lesson note preparation,   it is expected of the teacher to have a personal plan for the term or the academic year. A personal plan will put your job description in your context. Everybody has issues to deal with. For example, teachers embark on personal development programs or deal with family raising issues. You must have a plan that will help you to allocate time to your activities. Also, establish a culture or routines in your classroom to ward off any unfamiliar responsibility. However, be flexible in the execution of your plan in order not to jeopardize your life with stress. The establishment of a classroom routine ensures that teaching and learning flow in an orderly manner. This reduces the teacher’s work because learning is a collective responsibility.

Secondly, you are not the epitome of knowledge. The teacher is not the reservoir of knowledge. Most teachers think that they are supposed to know everything in this world. Let your students know that you don’t know it all and that they have a lot to offer during lesson delivery because teaching and learning is a collaborative effort of both the students and the teacher. This will boost the confidence level of students and awaken their inquiry skills. If this happens, students will be feeding the class more information in a limited time. This will help the teacher to relinquish part of his burden to students to save energy for other works. NB. You are to guide students to discover knowledge by themselves. Give students group works, individual projects, and assignments and be the one that will summarize their ideas into substantial and credible knowledge.

Also, use peer assessment to check students’ understanding of lessons. Assessment of students may seem hectic at times. Therefore, if part of the assessment can be done through peer review, it will reduce the teacher’s workload. Develop an assessment guide for students to use to rate the works of their colleagues. Allow students to write down the comments on the work of their peers and summarize their comments into a report on students’ performance. Students will develop a good sense of judgment to make relevant contributions to ongoing discussions in the classroom which will make your work so easy and stress-free.

In addition to the above, use resource persons to assist you in lesson delivery. It is common knowledge that if you are not an expert in an area, you will struggle to deliver content in that area to the understanding of your students. Since each teacher has his/her strengths and weaknesses, don’t feel bossy to employ the services of resource persons to helps you with the area that you don’t have mastery over. For instance, a social studies teacher with a business background may struggle to teach the geography aspect of social studies. She/he must contact a colleague or anybody that has mastery over geography to help explain the concepts to students. It will help save energy and time.

Finally, record all the activities that went on in the classroom during the academic year. Compile these documents into a notebook and update them as the years go by. To make your work easier, it is imperative to reflect on what you did in the past. How effective were your plans and how do you think you can make them better. This will help you grow personally and professionally. A written record of your experiences will enable you to have a hands-on solution to future problems. This is in line with what Baldwin J., (1924-1987) said: “know from whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go”.

By:

Bright Damankah

 

 

HOW TO TEACH THE LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET

 

Teaching young children can be a daunting task especially if a teacher finds himself/herself in a deprived community where most of the parents are poor or uneducated. This is because it needs 100% collaboration between the parents who value and understand education and the teachers who are motivated and committed to bringing abstract to reality. For these tips to work well, the stakeholders must be willing to commit resources. The government should not hide under the statement “teachers are trained to improvise” to shirk responsibilities. 

Mostly, children are trained to recite the letters of the alphabet without proper identification methodologies. This hinders children’s ability to read and write as they climb the academic ladder. I hope that the following tips work.

1.      Getting ready

A pre-school child can learn faster when learning tasks are arranged coherently and starts from known to unknown and also from easy to difficult. They learn best with concrete materials. Therefore, make sure to gather the concrete models of the letters of the alphabet. For example, the letters of the English alphabet is twenty-six hence if you have twenty pre-school children in your class, be sure to get twenty different sets of these concrete models to cater for individual differences.

2.      Allow them to perceive these materials with their sense organs.

Children have their way of perceiving objects; they see and feel the shapes of the letters. Give them ample time to have contact with these concrete letters. Play with them individually by arranging the materials to form lines or circles.

3.      Introduce the concept of alphabets.

As children come into contact with the materials, they will develop love for particular letters unknowingly. It could be the shape or the colour of that letter that he appreciates.  He will always pick one or two letters anytime these materials are given to him/her. When you see this sign, it is time to introduce them to the concept of the alphabet. Start with the letters they like. Never start in a particular order as it happens in most cases. Give them the chance to show you what they want to learn and help the to learn at their own pace. It is not appropriate to write the letters of the alphabet on the board in a particular order and take the whole class through the recital process. Most of them will be passive learners and will find it difficult to identify these letters of the alphabet.  

4.      Pause, motivate and continue.

As the child develops the skill of identification, the teacher/parent must motivate him/her. This will cause him to want to know more. They will want to let you know that they master the skill of identification for you to appreciate them for good work done. Smile, clap, praise them give them gifts sparingly.

Since you have the starting point, you can introduce other letters randomly until your mission is accomplished. There you have it!

5.      Use songs of the letters of the alphabet to solidify the knowledge gained.

After the children can identify these letters, introduce them to some of the songs of the letters of the alphabet. A child who goes through this process will sing the songs with understanding because he/she knows what he/she is pronouncing in the song. As she sings, she visualizes the concrete models.

6.      Associate the song to the concrete materials repeatedly.

Let the child pause while singing and show you the letter she sung using the concrete material. He should associate the concrete models with the letters in the song. Remember to appreciate the effort of the child to motivate him/her.

7.      Go abstract

Congratulation! Your child is ready to handle letters of the alphabet in the abstract. At this point, the work of the teacher becomes easy. Write the letters on the chalkboard and guide the children to name them in the order in which they appear. Point to the letters randomly and ask children to pronounce their names.

8.      Test your effort.

Bring two children of the same level; one should go through this process and the other should be a non-beneficiary. Write the letters of the alphabet on the board and ask them to pronounce the names of the letters randomly. Fact! The child who did not benefit from this process will take a longer time to come out with the answer because he/she will recite in the brain, pause at where your pointer is pointing and give you the answer.

This can be used by caregivers in the pre-school and parents. Let’s help our children because they are our future. There could be other methods that can be applied. Explore and see what works for your ward.

By:

Bright Damankah       

 

 

HOW CAN TEACHERS HELP STUDENTS TO LEARN AND PASS EXAMINATIONS?

The school environment is like a sheet of paper. It has two pages; teachers and students. It also has instruction on one page and learning on the other page. Teachers teach and students learn. Teachers must teach the content as well as teach students how to learn. Students must also prepare physically, psychologically and emotionally to learn how to learn. Any student who cannot show this preparedness is doomed to failure.

These tips are not the only ways teachers can teach students how to learn because the individual is unique and must be treated as a unique entity. However, they are collections of experiences put together to favour the majority. These are discussed below.

1.      Know yourself.

Teachers have a great burden of helping individual students to identify themselves. A teacher, who can do this, makes his/her work very easy. This is because students who are aware of themselves turn to be responsible students. Teachers must help students to reflect and identify their personalities. Students should also write down in clear terms what they feel about education and how they think education will affect their lives. Students must note that teachers are humans and will in most cases, work with students who avail themselves and are willing to accept help.

2.      Set your goals.

A student who has not set goals is like a man who is taking a walk to nowhere. Most of the high achieving students are goal setters. They plan ahead of time. Teachers should help their students to set individual goals based on their differences. Every minute in school counts towards high achievement. Therefore, students must be assisted to write down a “SMART” goal. For example, an educational program that takes 3 years to complete, must have a goal that is “Specific”. Thus a goal that is specially tailored towards that program. It must have specific actions that are geared towards achieving that goal. “Measurable” goals must have indicators that can be observed to know that at a point in time, the student has achieved a certain degree of his/her goal. For instance, end of semester examination results. An “Achievable” goal is a goal that does not put unwarranted pressure on students. Teachers must help students to craft their goals to suit their uniqueness. For example, an average student should be helped to set a goal that will see him make a grade A with a score of 80% and not necessarily scoring 100%.  A “Relevant” goal contains actions that are important to the individual student’s imaginative personality and the progress to achieving academic excellence. Time is important to students’ achievement. Therefore, teachers ought to help students to set time-bounded goals. A three-year program should have action plans that will last for three years. Students should be taken through time management programs. A student who set a SMART goal is more likely to avoid re-sit.  

3.      Start early

It is said that the early bird catches the worm. Therefore, teachers have to motivate their students to start executing their action plans early to achieve their goals. They should stick to their study timetable without procrastination.

4.      Be bold to take actions

Teachers are to be the mirror that will reflect the actions of students to them. Help students to do away with unnecessary companies. Students are to form study groups but they should join groups that meet their goals. My experience as a student made me believe that study groups that have the ultimate goal to perform academically, will likely have members who are responsible.

 

In the nutshell, teachers and students must come together to create a school climate that is conducive enough for teaching and learning. If students fail to cope with the guidance of teachers, they will spend the whole school year without a good academic accomplishment. 

By: 

Bright Damankah      

          

Tips To Deal with Academically Poor Students

 Very often than not, we encounter students who find it difficult to cope with the academic systems in our various schools. Every professional teacher will be concerned with finding ways to help these "bad" students.

The following are my suggestions to deal with such a situation:

1. Be quick to identify such students.

A teacher must use his psychological and professional skills to identify students with academic difficulties through the application of individual differences ideology.

2. Device strategies to address the problem.

Teachers are trained to employ different approaches to teaching to help solve the challenges of individual differences in their classrooms. Therefore, we must surgically diagnose the needs of every student and be able to meet their needs individually.

3. Be a motivator.

Motivation is a powerful tool to build and uplift the confidence level of students including academically "bad" ones. We must encourage them in all aspects. Teachers must help students to build intrinsic motivation by helping them to unravel their purpose of education. Aside from that, A teacher must use extrinsic motivation but sparingly to boost the confidence level of students.

4. Develop a "school sibling". 

School sibling is a situation where the teacher uses his/her professional understanding to pair Intelligent students with poor students and makes them develop relationships to help one another in terms of academic achievement. Monitor their progress and help if the need arises.

5. Do not compare them with other students.

In most cases, when teachers feel that they exhaust their strategies but got no positive result, they turn to compare academically poor students with other students who are known to be intelligent. The secret is that the more you compare them, the more fed up you become and the more likely you are to sideline them in your class. Find their strength and capitalise on it to help them.

6. Never insult a student you classify as an academically poor student. 

It is an unprofessional behaviour of a teacher to insult students for poor academic achievement. It makes students feel timid and inferior to the " sharks" in the classroom. They lose the sense of belongingness which adds to the existing frustration that they might be going through. 

In conclusion, we must note that every student has his/her weaknesses and strengths. We should reflect on the quote "no child is a tabula rasa".

Let's help the students that we teach to make the world a better place to live.

By: 

Damankah Bright