How to be an Amazing Teacher

Caroline Bentley-Davies

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781845904425
• eBook ISBN: 9781845906924
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In most of our school experience there was an amazing teacher - the teacher who changes our outlook on life, helped us succeed and whose lessons we will never forget. What made them that outstanding teacher and what are the tips and techniques and tactics that make some teachers really first class? How do I improve my skills? How can I get behaviour right? How can I motivate pupils who don't seem to want to learn? Carefully blending practical advice, real life scenarios and expert opinion this book will make any teaching career more rewarding.

Section I

The Skills of an
Amazing Teacher

Chapter 1

Why We Need to Foster the Skills of an Amazing Teacher

“For me, an outstanding teacher tries to put the fun back into learning; whilst never losing the focus that something challenging and worthwhile is being learnt.

Sue Lane, senior secondary consultant, Peterborough”

People decide to become teachers for a whole host of reasons. Some know from an early age that they have a vocation. Their desire to pass on information and instruct others can be overwhelming. Younger siblings and soft toys have been lined up and practised on from the tenderest of ages. For these individuals the road to teaching is well planned and rigorously signposted. Others come to it much later in life, deciding that the corporate world has a poverty of fulfilment, despite its obvious material trappings. Others are cast adrift on the sea of careers and eventually try teaching as one of many possible suitable choices, surprising themselves by enjoying and committing to a career they didn’t visualise themselves ever undertaking. It doesn’t matter how you decided to become a teacher; what matters is that you did and that while you are teaching you continually seek to become the best teacher you can. Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it?

Watching an amazing teacher is like watching any specialist: they make it look effortless and straightforward when it fact it takes an immense amount of skill and split-second decision making to make it happen. An amazing teacher commands the complete attention of their class (not an easy task when thirty-one or more individuals have many more exciting activities on their minds). An amazing teacher notices and responds to students as individuals, noticing perhaps that Ian is rather quiet today, or that Millie isn’t trying her hardest or that Michael lacks confidence with a particular task. An amazing teacher addresses these issues directly or makes a mental note to have a quiet word with the student or check with their form tutor so that barriers to learning are broken down. If you have been taught by an amazing teacher you will know what it is like to be encouraged, to be pushed, to be challenged and to feel supported that with their guidance you can achieve your very best.

Developing the skills of an amazing teacher takes time. It also takes effort and the ability to reflect and be honest about your performance and your qualities. Becoming an amazing teacher is not all about length of service. We have all experienced in many different areas of life the lacklustre individual who claims expertise or even ‘excellence’ purely because they have been doing the same job for over twenty years. But twenty years of doing the job isn’t the same as twenty years of experience. It all depends on whether the individual has thought and reflected on what they have done – or whether they are just repeating the same year twenty times over.

The same is true in developing the skills and characteristics of an amazing teacher; we have to be willing to think and sometimes even rethink the way we go about something. Some amazing teachers are in their first few years of teaching. Some teachers have become amazing teachers after a much longer period. What is evident about all really exceptional teachers is that they still believe there is plenty left for them to learn and set about doing this.

In defining the essence of an amazing teacher I think it helps to think about the five Es: enthusiasm, expertise, empathy, empowerment and enterprise. These reflect the key attributes that an amazing teacher has in abundance. Developing and refining these skills takes time, hard work and commitment. You may feel that some of these come more naturally to you than others, but the ones you struggle with most are actually the ones to start with.

1. Enthusiasm

Whatever you are teaching – whether it is Maths, Modern Languages or making meringues – the key to getting your message across in a successful way is enthusiasm. An amazing teacher gets seriously excited about their subject. They find the finer points of their subject endlessly fascinating but most importantly they transfer that excitement to their students. Think about Gordon Ramsay for a moment: you only have to watch him give a cookery demonstration or guide a would-be chef to see him literally bouncing with enthusiasm as he discusses the ingredient or dish he is planning to cook.

So you have to be excited about whatever it is you are teaching. That seems straightforward enough, doesn’t it? However, there are some areas of the curriculum which are rather demanding, difficult or just plain dull. The enthusiastic teacher realises this so puts effort and energy into finding creative, innovative ways to keep themselves and most importantly their charges interested about the topic.

I recently observed a Maths lesson in which I sat next to a rather sulky 14-year-old girl who I had met in the previous lesson where she had scowled, sulked and whispered her way throughout the entire period. In the Maths lesson she worked diligently and produced more work in ten minutes than she had done in the whole of the previous hour. When I implied that she seemed to enjoy Maths she dissented saying, ‘No, I don’t!’ When I remonstrated that clearly she must like it since she was working much harder than she had in the previous lesson, she raised a scornful eyebrow and asked me to observe the teacher for a minute. ‘The thing is,’ she sighed, ‘he’s just so enthusiastic that even though I don’t like Maths, you just find yourself trying, even if you don’t want to.’ Here was high praise indeed and the efforts of the enthusiastic teacher were plain to see. He was a highly engaging teacher in his sixties who had gone to great efforts to make his lesson interesting. It had pace, rigour and challenge. He most probably had taught this area of the curriculum a hundred times in his career. But what was most noticeable was his passion for numbers and the excitement with which he explained what they were going to be doing. Most importantly he became enthused and excited by the students’ responses and their efforts rather than his own mathematical skills.

Enthusiasm really is infectious. It is in finding fresh ways to teach a topic or reignite your own enthusiasm when teaching Macbeth for the fifteenth time that is the challenge. We need to strive to be like that Maths teacher who, seemingly against their will, gets his students motivated and interested in the subject.

2. Expertise

Enthusiasm is incredibly important; it is the spark that lights the interest for a student in a topic and makes them focus on the lesson even when they’d rather be thinking about something or somebody else. However, enthusiasm on its own is never enough. Enthusiasm needs to be tempered by the rigour and effort of careful lesson planning and underpinned by the expertise of the specialist. An amazing teacher continually develops and enhances their expertise – even if they have a first class degree in that subject. If you are keen to develop your know-how then you will be constantly looking for different, unusual and more effective ways of teaching a skill or concept to your students.

Recently I was running a training course for newly qualified teachers (NQTs) and we were sharing the different ways we each had for teaching a similar concept. Everybody was reacting excitedly to each others’ ideas, weighing them up, reflecting on them, asking questions and deciding whether or not this would be a useful technique for employing with their own students. At the end of the session we all had several new ideas that we were interested in trialling and even as the trainer (or supposed expert) I had learnt two new methods. It pays to be receptive, alert to new ideas, always honing our expertise.

This open attitude towards learning contrasted greatly with an observation by one NQT who commented that she couldn’t understand her head of department’s attitude. Apparently he didn’t attend courses and when we asked why she explained that he had simply said that he had ‘nothing more to learn about teaching his subject’. What an assertion! Obviously starting with excellent subject knowledge is a great benefit and nobody would dispute that having a good master’s degree makes you an expert. However, developing expertise is a process not a destination – and we all need to develop our expertise.

Many subjects are still developing (think of all the amazing developments in science and ICT where breakthroughs are made every year and the technology behind your latest laptop becomes obsolete sometimes before you have even finished paying for it). Even if your subject of choice is medieval history, new research is always being published and even if the material is the same there are a myriad of new techniques, technologies and teaching ideas to discover, embed and enjoy. We owe it to ourselves to become experts in the subjects we are teaching. We need to become specialists in all the different ways and various strategies involved in teaching. We need to think carefully about developing further knowledge about parts of the curriculum we are less sure about and in continually enriching our skills. Would you really want to be taught by somebody who thought that they had already amassed a complete and extensive knowledge and had nothing more to learn? It is amazingly arrogant to believe that we have nothing further to learn. Interestingly the school in question soon received an Ofsted inspection ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for How to be an Amazing Teacher
• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Section I : The Skills of an Amazing Teacher
• Section II : Assessment for Learning and the Amazing Teacher
• Section III : Achievement for All
• Section IV : Solving Tricky Issues and Difficulties
• About Caroline Bentley-Davies
• Further reading and resources
• Index
• Copyright