Buzz
1. Understand What Others Expect From You
What do the principal and department heads expect you to achieve? What are your goals as an educator? How do your personal expectations align with the overall objectives of the school? If you truly understand these connections, success will follow.
2. Your Role Is to Guide the Learning and Cognitive Process
Remember, your job is not to force others into a fixed mindset, but to help them think for themselves. Guide students to explore issues on their own and never impose your own thoughts and methods onto them.
Allow learners to take the lead in their work. Once you master the skills of teaching, the process becomes easier. Shift the focus to the students and support them, rather than doing everything yourself.
3. You Need to Understand the Learning Process
The role of a teacher is to transform knowledge into practical application. However, you must know how to provide guidance during learning tasks, rather than simply giving students pre-existing knowledge.
4. You Need to Build Trust
To effectively guide someone in their learning journey, you must first build trust. Therefore, trust and relationships come before knowledge.
5. Create a Safe Environment for Failure and Overcoming Challenges
To create a safe environment for failure and overcoming challenges, start by reflecting on your own experiences. What made you feel secure enough to tackle difficulties? Once you find this, you will be better equipped to help students overcome their own barriers. Embracing failure will ignite motivation and determination for success.
6. Listen Actively
Listening is the foundation of all skills. Learn to listen with all your senses and tools. Whenever you're uncertain about something, simply listen.
Make an effort to listen deeply. What are your students truly concerned about? What are their core values? What dreams, hopes, and aspirations drive them?
Engage in professional discussions about the students' issues, ensuring that these meetings are meaningful and lead to real improvements in your work.
7. Understand Your Role Clearly
In your role, ensure you're supporting learners, not just teaching them. Speak less than one-third of the class time. Trust that by encouraging students to talk, you'll inspire them to ask more questions and engage in deeper thinking.
8. Find Joy in Your Work
To excel in any job, you must first love it. Find passion in teaching. When you feel uncertain about returning to the classroom, miss the students, or crave something new, that's when you know you're truly enjoying your work as an educator.
9. Practice and Reflect Frequently
To master teaching, you must practice and reflect extensively. Remember, it takes at least 10,000 hours of practice to become skilled in teaching. Find colleagues who share the same interests and practice together—consistently, without stopping.
10. Share Activities About Learners
This is a common practice in teaching. Use student assignments, learner profiles, and videos of student interactions to analyze and discuss the information together.
11. Avoid Overloading Yourself
This is a difficult lesson, but you must learn it. Avoid taking on too many projects, responsibilities, or tasks. You need time for teaching, reflection, and practice. Focus on exploring new areas of teaching rather than getting sidetracked by other tasks.
12. Patience
There will be many changes in school, and they will take up much of your time. Tackle tasks step by step with a solid plan. You need patience and should not rush through your responsibilities. Especially when working with learners, patience is key to helping them complete their learning tasks.
13. Stay Curious, Always Crave New Things
Always remain curious about everything around you. Learn by continuously asking questions without judgment. Reflect on hypotheses, biases, and perspectives… Your experiences in thinking will become valuable tools for your teaching practice.
14. Always Demonstrate Compassion
You need to practice forgiveness and compassion—toward your students, colleagues, and yourself. When you embody this, it will naturally spread throughout the school environment.
15. There is No One-Size-Fits-All Method in Your Work
The target audience for teachers is students—real human beings with unique personalities and abilities. Each student comes from a different family background, which leads to variations in psychology and expressions. Therefore, a teacher's job is to continuously learn, listen, and adapt. As a result, there will never be a single, perfect method for teaching.
16. Broaden Your Concept of Teaching
What does teaching mean to you? What do parents and principals define teaching as? From these varying perspectives, expand and enrich your own definition of the teaching profession.
17. Teaching Doesn’t Mean Knowing Everything
You don’t have to know everything or be highly detailed about a specific subject or complex issues like curriculum design. After all, you are not a specialist in every field.
