[0:01]Hello everyone. Uh this is Rashid. Today I'm going to share my views about teaching in general and what makes a good teacher great.
[0:12]Of course, we have lots of good teachers in our schools, colleges, and universities, but to make a difference and bring about a positive change in our learners' lives, to be good is not enough, and we have to be great.
[0:25]We have to be great teachers. Now to achieve greatness as a classroom teacher, the first and the most important thing is, uh we should have a positive attitude towards teaching.
[0:40]Right, so what is a positive attitude?
[0:44]A positive attitude is the way you approach your classroom. It's the way you approach your students, the teaching material, the way you greet your students in the morning.
[0:56]It's how you start and finish your lessons. It's how you leave your classroom with a sense of fulfillment among the students.
[1:04]It's all about your positive body language, how you behave in your class, how you respond to your students' questions. It's about your gestures, your facial expressions, whether they, whether they are friendly or threatening.
[1:17]It's about using humor and telling jokes to kill boredom in the classroom. If you have a positive attitude, your students will be responding to you and there won't be an element of fear or threat in your classroom.
[1:31]They will listen to you and they will value your words, your feedback. All this will contribute to creating synergy among the students, and they will be more open to learning.
[1:43]They will also help you develop good rapport with them as you will create an environment of, uh, an environment of trust and interdependence.
[1:54]This will show how passionate you are about your teaching. This will also indicate how much you care about your students and their learning.
[2:04]If you have this positive attitude, they will lead to inspire, motivate, and encourage your learners. And when you inspire them, they will be ready to take responsibility for their own learning.
[2:20]Right, so as you create a conducive learning environment in the classroom, you can put your students in pairs, groups, and teams to complete a task.
[2:32]Great teachers develop learners' curiosity about different topics. They create a competitive environment that generates, uh, energy in the classroom and involves learners in meaningful activities.
[2:47]When students share their learning experiences with each other, they develop their study skills such as self-learning and group learning. Well, great teachers make groups of weaker and stronger learners and give it everyone a chance to participate in various activities and learn from each other. Once they're finished their task, you give them insightful feedback that improves their learning.
[3:14]and shows them new ways to develop themselves. This way you reduce your workload and put responsibilities on the shoulders of the students.
[3:22]For instance, in this technological era, you can ask your learners to use Google search engine and work on a given topic and share it in the classroom. The third important point is that great teachers empathize with their students.
[3:43]Now, they don't punish or penalize them, but help and facilitate them. They try to understand their students. Great teachers consider mistakes as an integral part of students' learning.
[3:55]They understand their needs and appreciate their differences because not all students have the same level of understanding. They don't have the same learning backgrounds or learning styles. So great teachers identify the strengths and weaknesses of their learners.
[4:13]They sit with weaker students and talk to them in person, listen to them and let them think about their weaknesses. Great teachers help students devise strategies to overcome their weaknesses. In short, they, they don't teach but work as mentors and coaches.
[4:34]They make things easy for their learners by helping them identify resources. As Will Durant calls it the humanization of knowledge. Great teachers are there to work on how to make the comprehension of complex ideas easy for their students. Great teachers give students directions. They show them how to find solutions to problems.
[4:57]The fourth key habit of great teachers is that they don't stop learning.
[5:06]Well, a great teacher is a good learner who continues to learn and develop, both in a formal and informal way. No doubt that a teacher or a great teacher is a resourceful person and he knows about his subject, and probably more than that.
[5:23]He, he reads different, uh, books and articles about different things and shares ideas with their students, peers, and friends.
[5:35]Great teachers make use of online resources such as YouTube, Eric, and number of other databases. They write blogs. They write journal articles. They write their diaries, and they share these things with their colleagues, with their students.
[5:55]Since they have a positive attitude towards teaching and learning, they never complain about the lack of resources. Rather, they come up with an out-of-the-box solution and make their own teaching and learning an enjoyable experience.
[6:12]Great teachers work in professional learning communities or communities of practice and share ideas and their teaching experiences and knowledge with other professionals in the field. Of course, interaction with other professionals is the source of learning for them.
[6:32]Great teachers are reflective practitioners. They evaluate their teaching practices. They think about classroom management.
[6:40]They consider students' learning progress and their own learning at the same time. And they have one goal and that is to improve their teaching and develop their learners.
[6:55]It's important to reflect on your teaching practices. It should be a regular practice of a great teacher. At the end of a lesson or a lecture, you should see what went wrong and what worked really well for you and your students. And how will you do it differently next time? Great teachers reflect and connect today's lesson to the lesson they are going to give tomorrow.
[7:20]Well, I'm sure it's not a definitive list of habits that great teachers usually have. But if you follow these points, these steps, and if you develop these habits, as a good teacher, I'm sure you will become a great teacher. I hope you enjoyed this video. Don't forget to give me your valuable feedback, because we learn from each other, and we should never stop learning. Goodbye.
