Chapter 6 Notes

Effective teaching is much more than an intuitive process. A teacher must continually make decisions and act on those decisions.

How can you avoid this complacency and stagnation? One strategy is to maintain your curiosity and develop habits of inquiry and reflection.

Developing the habits of inquiry and reflection should begin now, in your teacher education program. Your experiences with schools, teachers, and students along this path will give you many opportunities to reflect on what has occurred.

As you reflect, you are likely to encounter and think about moral and ethical issues. Teachers make moral and ethical decisions every day.

The role of the teacher is a reflective decision maker who must make many decisions almost instantly, as she adapts her teaching to changing classroom conditions.

In each of these planning, implementing, and evaluating stages of instructional decision making,

Teachers must ask themselves not only "What am I going to teach?" but also "What should my students be learning?" "How can I help them learn it?" and "Why is it important?" To answer these questions, teachers must be familiar with children and their developmental stages.

There are five areas of competence to be essential for a teacher:

1. Attitudes that foster learning and genuine human relationships

2. Knowledge of the subject matter to be taught

3. Theoretical knowledge about learning and human behavior

4. Personal practical knowledge

5. Skills of teaching that promote student learning

Many people believe that the teacher's personality is the most critical factor in successful teaching. If teachers have warmth, empathy, sensitivity, enthusiasm, and humor, they are much more likely to be successful than if they lack these characteristics.

There are four major categories of attitudes that affect teaching behavior: (1) the teacher's attitude toward self, (2) the teacher's attitude toward children and the relationship between self and children, (3) the teacher's attitudes toward peers and pupils' parents, and (4) the teacher's attitude toward the subject matter.

Children are sensitive observers of adult behavior, and they often see, and become preoccupied with, aspects of the teacher's attitude toward them. In many cases, the teacher may be unaware of which attitude he or she is projecting. Consider how a teacher's effectiveness might be reduced by these feelings or attitudes toward students:

• A strong dislike for particular pupils and obvious fondness for others

• Biases toward or against particular ethnic groups

• A bias toward certain kinds of student behavior, such as docility or Inquisitiveness

• An uneasiness in working with children who have disabilities

In general, a teacher's expectation that all students can succeed seems to make a difference in students' achievement.