Love is a wonderful feeling. Feeling passion, dedication and the need to always be better are sentiments that makes us happier, more productive, and more focused on what’s actually important.
Whendeep inside, we know we are doing the right thing at our job, work becomes fun, exciting and enjoyable. But let’s be fair, life is not always full of purple butterflies, rainbows, and long deep breaths.
Today, we want to show you how to fall in love again with your class. Sometimes, even if we truly, deeply love to teach, we just lose sight of the magic. Today, we give you some tips to strengthen your love for teaching, for your students, for STEM, and for your class.
Check out these tips to re-fall in love with your class and with your daily activity of teaching (Any similarity with romantic love life, it is not a coincidence).
Try new things out in the classroom
New educational tools and platforms can give a whole new feeling to your class. When we always do the same things, and when we always use the same materials to keep our students engaged, at some point or another, they will get bored.
Bringing to your class new, engaging, fun, and gamified platforms or tools can help you to more enjoy teaching.
Don’t forget that education is about feedback, understanding our students’ reactions, analyzing what works better for their learning process, and designing a path that will guarantee –at some level- their success in life.
Listen to them: Your students have things to say
Each student has something to say. When we successfully listen to them and when we understand their unique goals and capacities, our teaching becomes more meaningful, and more meaningfulness opens the door to passion.
Some students actually love the integration between arts and engineering, others, want to program virtual robots all day. Listening to their voices, will enlarge your perspective, and enrich your class.
Indeed, it is a challenge to hear these multiple voices. But, feeling challenged creates motivation. Being motivated creates thepassion to transcending. Having thepassion for what we do in the classroom will allow us to love what we do even more.
Personalize the process. Not every student thinks, acts or expects the same.
Offering a learning environment where each student can learn at his (or hers) own pace, will enable us to perform more personalized classes, and therefore, to feel the connection with each student.
By personalizing the process of education, formative assessment takes the central stage. Thatleaves summative evaluations on the side and allows teachers to explore areas of evaluation where a constant interaction is necessary.
Understanding the inherent dynamic aspect of education, we open the doors for creativity to step in. New ideas, customized programs and curriculums, and paying attention to the learning process of each student could allow us to look at education from a brighterand more hopeful point of view.
Focusing on real life problems
It’s true, problem-based learning and project-based learning are a huge trend in education.
The sentence “the best way of learning is teaching” is very accurate.
When, in our STEM class, we teach our students to solve real life problems, we are also learning how to do so ourselves.
It’s true, they are lucky to have tools like CoderZ available for their learning process, but in this mutual apprenticeship, teachers can start loving what they do again. This time, knowing that we’re not only givingbut also receiving a lot from our little pupils.
Be creative, enjoy the teaching process.
Sometimes, we only need to take a deep breath, smileand remind ourselves why we are doing what we are doing.
Creativity is very important, let’s try to bring new elements to the classroom. One of the best ways to add more enthusiasm to our daily activity is to create that enthusiasm ourselves.
Enjoy the teaching process, as you enjoy the learning process of your students. Fall in love with your abilities, with the tools you can use to teach, and with your class itself. All the answers are within. At the end of the day, we just need more love in what we do, technology will progress anyway.
