BE A TEACHER LEADER

REINIER Z. TORRES

Below are some of the steps you can take in order to improve your teaching and leadership skills:

Embody what you teach. If you teach writing, be a writer. If you’re an English teacher, read voraciously and breathe language itself. If you’re a math teacher, focus on logics, numbers, and computations. Ultimately, this means to show love and be the things you teach with compassion, integrity, peace, humility, kindness, honesty, and most of all grace. There is an inherent leadership in that kind of passion.

You should be the expert in your classroom. This does not mean having all answers, rather it is having the knowledge of the capabilities of your students and knowing the best approach on how they can learn better. You are the sole person who knows what goes into your classroom every day and no one else can tell you differently.

Keep yourself adept with the latest technologies. Don’t fear to learn new technologies, instead embrace it and it might help you in the long run as you communicate with your students. Since they are a generation of tech-savvy students, as a teacher it is your role to keep up with them. There is no one size which fits all education problems, but you can find something new if you allow yourself also to learn new things.

Always reflect on your practice. Even if you think you are doing okay in the way you teach, take a time to pause and observe yourself from a macro-perspective. You should ask yourself whether you are growing as a leader, reflect on how passionate you are in teaching, and where most of your time is spent. How you grow as a person ultimately depends on you, that’s why you always have to determine the state of your heart and mind.

There are still so many things you can do, but I hope this short list will help you in your teaching advocacy as it helped mine along the years.

-oOoThe author is Teacher III at Malino High School, San Jose Malino, Mexico, Pampanga