CHALLANGES FACED BY A TEACHER IN THE CLASSROOM

 

Challenges faced by a teacher in the classroom

The biggest challenge faced by a teacher is, how engaged students are when being taught. Engagement can be behavioural and cognitive. The level of students’ interest and curiosity will determine their progress. If students are not focused, it will disrupt their conduct and could create chaos in the classroom.

How to keep them motivated about their targeted goals? Teachers can do it by planning a strategy according to the students’ age group and cultural environment.

A teacher will:

Design lessons with authentic material, students can relate to. The cultural relevance of teaching material will involve students and they will participate freely in class activities. This fear-free environment would provide a feedback to the teacher as to how much engaged and motivated the students are.

A good idea to keep them engaged is ‘random riddle’. The teacher randomly throws a riddle to any student. This activity can keep their focus alive. Further, by this drill, the student’s language skills (listening, speaking) can be judged and evidence can be interpreted so as to know the cognitive talent achieved by the student.

Students enjoy peer teaching. Make appropriate groups of students and assign a topic to each group. These groups will work together and create a presentation for the class. They will be asked questions by their fellow classmates. This will initiate a sense of competition too.

Humans like freedom. The students should not consider the classroom as a place where they are duty-bound for a defined time. While assigning projects or planning activities, Invite their suggestions. It will create a sense of participation and choice in them which will lead towards success.

We are living in a digital era. As a teacher, incorporate technology into class. Rather than using old-style PowerPoint presentations, use computer-based training method. Encourage your students to do web-search to gather learning material. Interactive learning apps aid a lot in keeping students motivated and enthusiastic. Additionally, playing educational games keeps them awake and stimulated. Further encourage them to create drawings, charts and maps from the gathered information.

Kind of questions teacher may ask?

Asking questions by the teacher is also an important part of learning. Regularly ask questions to ensure that all students in class are active and thinking. Make sure that they have an answer to question. By asking questions, keep every student focused and involved in the continuing activity. They have to prepare an answer for any question raised during an activity. For testing their comprehension skills, I use questions that have a limited number of correct answers. After asking a question, a wait of about 10 seconds is appropriate. Students should not, however, be bombarded with questions.

The questions should be progressively refined in every session. As a teacher, review all questions and the answers received from students. The questions which led to unexpected answers would be noted and refined in the next session.