common weaknesses of teachers

Instead of ‘have you done it, are you ready, have you finished?’, make the dominant query “now, have you learned and understood it?” and check. To address underachieving groups, teach everyone better. In this instance, however, I’ve emailed it to my school account, in order to re-read it again at work this week, and also to pass it on to my colleagues. We need to de-clutter the curriculum or reduce class sizes to allow teachers to offer children their best practice. Run-on Sentences and Sentence Fragments. But I’d argue that if you slogged away and did these things in every lesson you’d never finish the course and you’d have some very bored high/middle achievers because everything would end up being done at the pace of the weakest. Teacher and coach Terry Heick says that one of the problems teachers have in identifying their weaknesses is that they focus on what they're doing, not how the kids are responding. In this article, we're looking at 10 of the most common leadership and management errors, and highlighting what you can do to avoid them. Selecting a style that addresses the needs of diverse students at different learning levels begins with a personal inventory—a self-evaluation—of the teacher’s strengths and weaknesses. | teacherhead - October 16, 2019, Pingback: Reframe the Conversation | The Coaching Conversation - October 16, 2019, Pingback: Luwte | Maker Education in Nederland - November 8, 2019, Pingback: Facilitating the facilitator: building rapport – mynottsmusings - November 17, 2019, Pingback: 7 Deadly Difficulties in Teaching. It also helps them get a better idea about you personally to see if you’re a good fit for the company. These example answers may help you prepare for your interview: “I am an excellent and energetic collaborator. Vague, General Statements and Fluff. With the help of self-help books and colleagues, I am learning to become more spontaneous so I can pivot from my fixed position and accept changes.”. But that doesn’t necessarily happen – especially for the weakest students. Your writing journey should be fun. When you interview for a teaching position, you may be asked to explain some of your strengths or weaknesses as they relate to your teaching abilities. Students come to the classroom with different life stories. Teachers may have a tendency to cater to the educational needs of students who favor the same learning preferences as the educator. A particular interest of mine has long been what kids are taught in the early years of adolescence. The most amazing thing of all, is that I’ve read and commented on a Saturday morning – my most sacred ‘school-free’ moment in the whole week. The STAR interview response technique is a way to use stories and anecdotes from your life to illustrate traits that are in demand in the position for which you are applying. To me, it seemed to start from the observation that teachers often don’t aquire enough evidence that their students have understood taught concepts. Some examples of weaknesses related to academics include: Coursework (a particular course you struggled with) Essay writing (be sure to emphasize your strength in other forms of writing) Being overly involved in on-campus activities (if a student or recent graduate) During an interview for a teaching position, your interviewer may ask behavioral questions so they can see how you have managed specific situations in the past. Firstly, let me thank you for writing such a practical, clear, and incisive post! Weaknesses are tricky to talk about, so you need to be careful when sharing examples of yours. I agree that some teachers will take umbrage, but for those who don’t and are wondering how to implement some of this advice in the classroom here are three simple ideas that I use in maths classes that don’t require high levels of expertise and can be implemented quickly and cheaply: Yet the evidence from research into instructed SLA gives massive support to the claim that concentrating on activities which help implicit knowledge (by developing the learners’ ability to make meaning in the L2, through exposure to comprehensible input, participation in discourse, and implicit or explicit feedback) leads to far greater gains in interlanguage development than concentrating on explicit learning. The teacher hears a correct response for each question (from student putting their hand up) purring with joy, affirming the correctness, oblivious to the other 240 responses (many of which were totally wrong). I must recommend Best writing services. As a Learning and Support Teacher, I work with smaller groups (5-10) and feel I can and do follow this approach to teaching. I have watched over 50 hours of LbQ lessons and the impact is stunning. As Professor Timothy Brophy explains, rubrics are also helpful tools for teachers because they encourage “criterion-referenced rather than norm-referenced” scoring.. This is a world away from them focusing on whether anyone at all still does not know the answer. Terminate the tyranny of the task. In this article, we explain how to effectively answer questions about your strengths and weaknesses in a teacher interview and provide sample answers to help you plan your own. While online programs have significant strengths and offer unprecedented accessibility to quality education, there are weaknesses inherent in the use of this medium that can pose potential threats to the success of any online program. As I’ve explored in this post From “I’ve done it” to “I’ve learned it”. As a result, the least confident students can pass from lesson to lesson, going through the motions of lesson activities, being present, caught up in the general flow, without having their individual learning issues addressed; their learning gaps go undetected at the point of instruction and often remain. I kept him after school for an hour each week, but instead of detention, I asked him to help me clean up the classroom and prepare the lessons for the next day. disabilities arrive with a unique combination of strengths, weaknesses, and developmental needs that teachers must address (Hautala, 1995). Therefore, teachers need be competent in their knowledge of the subject they teach. This tells them nothing about who didn’t get it right. Please don’t take ‘umbrage’ if I suggest using a spellchecker! Teachers aren’t defined by one specific set of characteristics. Use guided individual practice extensively and intensively. As teachers, we often spend time devoted to turning our weaknesses around when we should be focusing on what we already bring to our students: our own particular approach to the classroom. The student’s explanation is started with “because” and at each stage of their explanation I can interject with another “why?”. Thank you Tom- wishing you would come one time to Germany helping us getting things sorted out. (It’s at the back to remind me to use it). In fact, I recently started a small newsletter in which I review teaching software, programs and apps for other teachers, and have built up more than 500 readers from word-of-mouth alone. This […] Read more: 12 Tough Interview Questions and Answers. The first of these questions can illustrate a strength (such as creativity or empathy) and the second can show how you overcame a weakness and learned from the mistake. Design curriculum deliberately with vocabulary and reading embedded in the planning so that target words are known by all students and teachers. Great ideas. Teachers are independent, but that can lead to isolation in problem solving, and some problems may necessitate advice from others.This is particularly true in dealing with confrontational situations such as dealing with an irate parent or a teacher's aide who arrives late to your class every day. The following are common academic weaknesses. Interview questions about your strengths and weaknesses are very common. Time to replace ‘formal observation’ systems with Instructional Coaching for everyone #CPD. As a teacher of some 20-years experience, I’ve read innumerable articles of this kind, but at the risk of sounding preposterously sychophantic, let me say this is literally the best one I’ve ever encountered…. I make homework expectations clear at the beginning of the school year, and keep parents updated throughout about exactly where their children stand. In the past, every time I read about a different classroom activity I wanted to try it out, and at the end of the day I ended up with so many ideas that it became difficult to … Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Make ‘all knowing all’ the explicit goal. The post-its are collected and the teacher looks through them to find his/her favourite mistake. Doing so is a worthwhile activity. For example, here are 10 common teacher interview questions and the best way to answer them. The boy resorted to ‘the water destroys the rocks’ because ‘erosion’ had eluded him and the grammar of erosion/erodes hadn’t been explored at all. Some strengths of a teacher may be a good speaker, engaging, as well as patient. Six Things That Made My Teaching Better – for me and my students. Not only did we have the best attendance record for the past six years and experience fewer discipline issues, but all seven teachers asked to remain on the same team the following year. This is the first post of yours that I’ve read and it is a cracker. Teachers then develop instruction and select appropriate strategies. Use a good repertoire of retrieval practice techniques that involve all students: Structure checking processes such that all students can check all the knowledge in hand, answering all the questions. I’d recommend doing it in private with a favorite libation—only one, because there is a need to be thoughtful and honest. Start at the top of this list, and work your way down—tackle the weaknesses one by one. But then, take as much time as you can to find out where the errors lie. Teachers should look for patterns of specific strengths and weaknesses in important component reading and language skills. We are so soaked with all the PbL learning stuff that we forget what teaching is all about. | teacherhead, Reframe the Conversation | The Coaching Conversation, Facilitating the facilitator: building rapport – mynottsmusings, 7 Deadly Difficulties in Teaching. The list of the following strengths may help you to identify what yours are and plan an effective interview answer: Consider these weaknesses when planning how to tell the interviewer what your weaknesses are: The information on this site is provided as a courtesy. I plan to continue attending every month in the foreseeable future.”, “As a teacher, I’ve always planned every lesson meticulously and well ahead of time. Poor Vocabulary Development The final example is also extremely common. Change ). "I got a job today!!! They have been called to become the slaves of those whom they teach. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. Before the interview, think through what you love about teaching and why you want to pursue a … 1. Hi Tom, your blog was recommended by a fellow teacher, I’ve got some reading to catch up on! will have to work hard to conscientiously avoid common pitfalls that can make the job even harder than it inherently is. With hectic schedules and lack of time, students can’t deal with extensive lists of assignments. STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action and Result. I found this really useful and plan to share it with staff on Monday as part of some quality first teaching training. Let me illustrate with six examples alongside some possible solutions: Sometimes I use the simplified idea that the ideal goal of a learning sequence is for ALL the students to learn ALL the material; for them ALL to achieve the learning goals. Sadly, the regular classroom teacher has up to 30 children, with a jam-packed curriculum and several children with untreated learning difficulties such as ADHD, SPD, etc. You pinpointed some weaknesses in teaching amazingly. There’s just so much mileage in this; so much slack to take up. The teacher will serve as the Federal Government and ask for money to help fund some of the debts that have occurred following the Revolutionary War. Ineffective testing or checking protocols. The prevalence of this issue is the main reason I feel we do more to address the needs of disadvantaged students and under-achieving subgroups by trying to teach everyone better instead of chasing interventions (To address underachieving groups, teach everyone better.). Some teacher weaknesses have to do with making assumptions about kids without knowing what their lives are like outside of school. ( Log Out /  From “I’ve done it” to “I’ve learned it”. Use the list of strengths and weaknesses to successfully answer common job interview questions. I will be teaching 5th grade next year!!! One of the most common interview questions that most of us experienced or will experience at some point is “What are your strengths and weaknesses?”.. Follow this link to view all of Mr. Lunday’s articles in his Codes of Conduct featured column series.]. Do this, systematically, deliberately and routinely. Thank you! Revisiting Dylan Wiliam's Five Brilliant Formative Assessment Strategies. Love your column and your Rainforest book. I think my biggest area of "needs improvement" is classroom management, sadly (no, I will not say that at the interview, but I definitely will re-read Tools For Teaching and make a plan before starting if I actually get the job!) The difference between them is their ability to identify what they are doing right and what is going wrong. Thanks again! They rely too heavily on collective responses and a generalised sense of student success rate without consciously and deliberately attending to each and every individual. Discussing your areas for improvement indicates a good level of self-awareness. The trick to this question is to find some nit-picky little . And Sandcastles. I feel quite strongly that this kind of practice really has to change. Cons of online learning. Too little exposition, especially at the beginning. Recently I’ve been in at least three of these situations where the student next to me got less than 50% on a recall test and, not only did the teacher not pick it up, their wrong answers were not sought out, discussed and explained and the students left none the wiser – beyond knowing that they had more stuff they did not understand! Thank you for such helpful and relevant constructive criticism. Answering Interview Questions About Weaknesses . In general, there are some strengths and weaknesses you should—and shouldn't—mention during a job interview. Maryellen Weimer April 5, 2017. This wasn’t a problem when I taught elementary school, but now that I am transitioning to teaching high school, I decided I had to do something about it. This applies equally to all subject teachers but is especially critical for those who handle subjects such as English, mathematics and science, where an erroneous understanding of one concept can lead to faulty comprehension of other concepts based on it. the Strengths and Weaknesses of American Teachers and American Education If one country want to be strong, the education is indispensable. 1. The 25 most common teacher interview questions and answers to prep for any teaching interview. Indeed is not a career or legal advisor and does not guarantee job interviews or offers. Compared to a 1:1 tutoring situation, the level of responsiveness to each individual student’s varying success rate is very low. One of the most significant challenges facing formal education in the United States is … New words are introduced by the teacher in their explanations, board-work, texts, powerpoint slides – often repeated and used by the teacher multiple times – on the assumption that this is sufficient for the students to absorb them into their vocabulary. Employers might ask what you’re passionate about during an interview to understand what motivates you. Lastly, educators, with generally good intentions, determine to strengthen the weaknesses of students. Turning it around, if we address these issues, it is also how the gaps can be closed. 1. The problem is this:  In a class of multiple individuals, it is not straight-forward to find out how successfully each individual person is learning, identifying what their difficulties or gaps are and then to use that information to close their learning gaps with appropriate responses. After the first explanation I will also ask “who has a different explanation or for a challenge can anyone use the word “XXX” in their explanation”, with XXX being some key terminology or academic vocabulary. thing and then turn it around into a strength. Prepare for the top interview questions for teachers with a time-tested approach. You don't want to knock yourself out of contention for the job because the interviewer thinks you're not qualified. New words are introduced by the teacher in their explanations, board-work, texts, powerpoint slides – often repeated and used by the teacher multiple times – on the assumption that this is sufficient for the students to absorb them into their vocabulary. Teachers Make Better Decisions. to “Does everyone know?” My biggest weakness is a combination of being overly enthusiastic and not having enough experience. List of Strengths & Weaknesses + Professional Answers. This re-frames mistakes as things to use as learning tools and gives the teacher an opportunity to tease out and address common misconceptions or quickly identify individuals or groups that need support. ( Log Out /  It is just so incredibly common for key terms not be given explicit rehearsal time during lessons so that the weakest students do not even get to say them once. From a dominant emphasis on seeking affirmation in correctness to familiar routines around seeking out residual errors and difficulties. Exceptional ability to handle lesson planning activities according to the specific needs of each student. View the purpose of questioning as providing feedback to you:  have I explained this well? School communities… invincible, inspiring, irreplaceable. This report is to examine my personal and professional skills, to identify my weaknesses and strengths and make some personal plans on how to improve and enhance them. Sometimes the difference between these two positions is extreme – unnecessarily so. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Provides all students with a common core of content; Provides an opportunity to enliven facts and ideas from the text; Provides teachers with ability to clarify issues; Provides an opportunity to develop ideas (that may be later used for publications) Provides immediate recall of information by students; The weaknesses of lectures are: When choosing weaknesses to mention in an interview for a teacher position, be honest and aim to explain how you adjust your work accordingly. Every student has strengths and weaknesses that surface in the classroom environment. It lead on to suggest that unless teachers actively search out points of confusion and misconception, then they are unable to address their learners’ needs. Sample enough students to get a reasonable picture. If you listen in discreetly as all students air their ideas – it gives a powerful insight. This wasn’t a problem when I taught elementary school, but now that I am transitioning to teaching high school, I decided I had to do something about it. If you can learn about these here, rather than through experience, you'll save yourself a lot of trouble! You should choose for your answer a strength that matters in teaching, and a weakness that is not essential for this profession. And your weaknesses? Lack of or Weak Transitions. Review performance evaluations and write what you perceive your strengths to be. Hi Tom, thanks for this good post that our headteacher sent round the link to just now. Of course, teachers have things they need to practice and work on, too—like answering interview questions in a way that’ll nab you that dream job at that amazing school. This is why I favour some kind of ability grouping whenever possible to minimise the effect of the drag and maximise the time available for help for the weak. Curriculum Notes #2:  Big picture first: then zoom in. And that’s where gaps widen. The post is self explanatory. A student designated as "lazy" or "unmotivated" may have spent the night in a shelter, and it's a wonder she even got to school that day. With the new Covid-19 guidelines in secondary teachers can check understanding of all students from their desks and can pause lesson for re-teaching where the feedback indicates an understanding problem. If you read this and think  ‘well of course – any good teacher does this already’ and take umbrage, let me suggest that in at least 50% of lessons I observe, one or more of these issues arises; sometimes it is marginal, sometimes it’s a chronic situation. In general, there are some strengths and weaknesses you should—and shouldn't—mention during a job interview. Very useful insight into common habits – thanks for sharing. I’ve explained it; I’ve said it out loud; I’ve told my engaging story; I’ve given my expert exposition; I’ve regaled the class with my witty engaging anecdote in my normal charismatic style that they love and that makes me so popular.…. A classroom teacher is faced with new challenges and obstacles that have never been dealt with before. Find out the best way to respond. Don’t be Kevin. Do you know how to answer what are your weaknesses? When you don’t have a teacher to cheer you on, it’s easy to feel down and worry you’ll never be good enough. Really glad you found it so useful. ( Log Out /  You could ask who got 3/5  or 8/10 on the quiz and then ask which answers they got wrong. You seem to start from the – false – assumption that learning English as an L2 is a predominantly a matter of explicit learning about the language. | teacherhead, Collection of recent ideas for better teaching and better teacher development. For example, you might feel unqualified to speak up at an important meeting when your idea could help the team to achieve a goal. The sampling concept is key. You can answer this question by mentioning a deficiency and explaining what you have done to overcome it. “There’s no cookie-cutter template for teachers,” says Britt. Every teacher has strengths and weaknesses. #FiveWays of Giving Effective Feedback as Actions. Know what they’ll ask in advance. Redundancy and Wordiness. Thanks! Teachers should look for patterns of specific strengths and weaknesses in important component reading and language skills. Mathematical Miscellany #33 | Mathematics, Learning and Technology, Ideas for better teaching. Teachers assume that students will hear the correct answers and self-edit accordingly.

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