How to Be an Effective Teacher

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How to be an efficient teacher 1. Learn your students' names. This cannot be overemphasized. You will be able to control your class better and gain more respect if you learn the students' names early on. If you are one who has a poor memory for names, have all students hold up name cards and take a picture of them on the first day of class. On the second class, impress them by showing them you know all their names. 2. Establish authority from the beginning. Expect your students to use English 100% of the time, and accept it if they only achieve 95% usage. Do not let them get away with speaking their mother tongue to communicate with their partner. Deal quickly with inappropriate conduct in a friendly yet firm manner. 3. Be overly prepared. If you don't have a clear lesson-plan down on paper, then make sure you have a mental one. You should know about how long each activity will take and have an additional activity prepared in case you have extra time. 4. Always consider the learners' needs when preparing for each lesson. Why are your students studying English? How will they use English in the future? What do they need to learn? If many of the students are going to study abroad at an American university, for example, then the teacher should be preparing them for listening to academic lectures and academic reading to some extent. If, on the other hand, most of the students have no perceived need for English in the future, perhaps you should be focusing on useful skills that they may use in the future, but may not be essential--skills such as understanding movie dialog, listening to music, writing a letter to a pen pal, etc. 5. Be prepared to make changes to or scrap your lesson plan. If the lesson you have prepared just isn't working, don't be afraid to scrap it or modify it. Be sensitive to the students--don' t forge ahead with something that
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