Education is the key essential to a good life. Whether it occurs in a formal or informal setting, it is fundamental to our survival in any society. With experience comes knowledge, and novice teachers enter this profession like no other. What the teacher will face regarding classroom management in the reality of being in the classroom might not align with what they learn in college. Building a repertoire of skills and abilities from trial and error experiences will ensure success in their practice. The promise of perfect practice will not come from genuine desire, and novice teachers will find difficulty comprehending. The pedagogical process is dynamic and filled with various complexities and is complicated by human interactions, relationships, and diversities. As a novice teacher, engaging in self-reflection will become central to being in the education profession. It will serve as a guide to developing the educator’s weak areas and maintaining the strong areas. The art of instructing others is a complex skill to develop; help given to novice educators should be done in a scaffolding manner to balance theory and practice, and self-evaluation may greatly benefit novice teachers (Schwarzer and Grinberg 2016).
Teaching requires constant critical decision-making for the good of the class as the instruction progresses.
How Expert Teachers Maintain Effectiveness in the Classroom
Expert educators can prepare lessons according to their previous understanding of knowing where the difficulties and challenges lie in the topics and resources to promote effective learning that might demand different and alternative approaches to teaching the learners and offset by having enough knowledge of the students.
Recognizing students’ characteristics as an expert teacher allows for adaptation and modification of instruction, thus reducing levels of uncertainty.
These educators, over the years, have engaged in systematic and critical self-engaging reflections to learn successfully from the experiences (Schwarzer and Grinberg, 2016).
What Novice Educators Should Do To Avoid Burnt Out and Maintain Success in The Classroom
Knowing the content, the learner's interest and special needs impact the decision on the type of resources, technology, and materials that will foster learner interest and challenge the students in supportive learning activities.
The selection of resources and classroom management strategies should align with state standards, students' learning styles, learner profile (diversity), assessments, and the availability of technological and instructional recourses or those recommended by the State.
To accomplish success in the pedagogical, thought should be given to the learners' and teacher's role in the delivery of the lesson and the expected learning outcome. Explicitly state and write learning goals and standards for the lesson on the board to inform learners at the beginning of the lesson expectations and skills to be learned with interjecting reminders.
Assign a time limit on all lesson plan sections to ensure class sessions will be appropriately accounted for and allotted for. Students will use the extra time to talk about irrelevant information and not the lesson.
Though didactic teaching methodology has its place in instructing students, the educator needs to be careful how dependent they become, as some might think it is easy. Still, in employing this method, the educator can be burnt out and overwhelmed when they become the primary source of knowledge in a teacher-centered lesson. Rote learning can be used in learning some skills to some degree, but the learners should be active participants in the learning and be able to create their own learning experiences through discovery learning. Do not allow the learners to be passive recipients ready to acquire the prepared knowledge in the textbook (Jahnke and Cerratto Pargman, 2019). Lessons designed to accommodate learner-centered learning will be more effective in building students' 21st-century skills.
Organization skill is an essential skill to have in the pedagogical to ensure efficiency in the delivery of the lesson. The lesson activity resources should be pre-prepared for smooth execution and aligned to the lesson's learning goals to connect technology usage to multimodal strategies to facilitate learner diversity.
To further help novice teachers acclimate themselves to the teaching profession, seek out a mentor, a teacher who teaches similar core areas, or another competent teacher if none is provided for teachers. Engaging in team-teaching and planning will help provide insight into learning activities that could afford the teacher with ideas of what could best suit the needs of the learners as interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary lessons aid and reinforce knowledge.
Strategies For a Rigorous and Appropriate Curriculum for All Learners
Rigor is achievable in a curriculum that provides cohesion and comprehensively connects the standards, instruction, and assessment. It applies to a level of difficulty and how students use their knowledge through higher-order thinking skills. Additionally, it also implies attaining a higher level of worth in both effort and outcomes while offering flexibility and adaptability to the diversifying and continually changing needs of the learners who use this curriculum— students learning and success depends on three critical components of rigor, thoughtful work, high-level questioning, and academic discussion.
Identifying and writing precise learning goals relevant and meaningful in lessons provides multiple opportunities for success through conscious, creative, and planned engaging classroom learning experiences to motivate all learners, even those who might be bored or disinterested (Ainsworth, 2011).
Rigorous curriculum strategies make accommodations for students who are advanced learners to help them achieve a more profound and expanded understanding and knowledge of any topic related to the lesson through enrichment and challenges that can build the learner academically.
Growth mindset learning enforces rigor in the curriculum by developing students' social, psychomotor, cognitive, and affective skills.
Classroom management strategies for rigor should further facilitate process focus learning that will develop students' skill sets of aptitudes, abilities, and techniques to acquire new knowledge and skills.
To effectively provide for rigor align the curriculum to all the levels of the Blooms' taxonomy objectives where students can scaffold from defining and explaining terms to create, synthesize, and analyze. By crossing the knowledge row with the process column, educators can plan goals, activities, and tests that let students learn various knowledge by utilizing various processes.
Allow students at times to select the way they would want to present an assignment and selection of research topics that they find exciting and fun. A rigorous curriculum strategy accounts for students' diversity and talent, and gifted development and promotes culturally relevant domain-specific talent that the students have will shine through the nurturing. Talent is not fixed or innate but relatively malleable and developed through practice and training.
The affective domain also affects the rigor of the curriculum. Cultivating a classroom culture of rigor will also require having a strong positive relationship with the students fosters investment in the class. It is the belief that the dislike of teachers by students hinders students learning and willingness and commitment to complete work for the teacher. Having a trusting and respectful class culture is paramount to developing curriculum rigor.
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