Teaching English: How To Encourage Our Students To Go On?

Hey You Guys!
How's Life?

  Today I wanna talk to you about how we can encourage and empower our students to keep going till the finish line and forget about the word "quit". I wanna share with you what I do with my students everyday, actually it has become a habit because since I started teaching in 2012 I notice how insecure and shy our students are, you know, every time they need to expose themselves you can see they sweating,literally. It's not about what subject you teach, students get insecure with pretty much anything when they have to speak in public or when they know somebody is listening but the question is, where does this fear come from? I wanna dig into this topic with you. Shall we?

   First things first, before analyzing our students profile we should look into ourselves because student's capacity to copy everything their Teachers do in the class is quite impressive, I'm not kidding, if you have been doing this long enough you should've noticed that as well. For instance, if the students see their Teacher's insecurities and difficulties they will never take you seriously. Let's say you have to read a big article for them and you make a lot of mistakes while reading it, students might think (and actually I've heard this from students) "If not even the Teacher can read this how in the hell could I." The problem isn't making a mistake, c'mon we're all humans hence we're likely to make mistakes too but we should always be prepared to make less mistakes in order to set the right example and show them what they can do as well.

  Now that we know that our classroom conduct reflects in our student's learning process it's time to think about the people we wanna change, for good. The classroom is really a stage, we experience every sort of things  you could possible imagine so is utterly important to respect their personal space, it shall make them comfortable with you, there's nothing more annoying than an invasive Teacher who likes to touch and speak spitting in your face so just think about everything you detest in a Teacher, your students will likely hate the same things but be open and curious to see if you're doing something that can be taken as disrespectful or rude. Once I heard from a school's principal that I worked for the following nonsense, she often said "we can't be their Teachers and be their Friends at the same time", and as you might already know by now I totally disagree with that and here's why.


  Firstly, they look up to us, so there's a huge responsibility attached to that. You ought to take interest in them, talk to them, ask how are they feeling because the truth is one day you won't feel like teaching that class and you will expect the same kind of empathy from them. Secondly, they are our co-workers as well, if we don't cultivate a close relationship with them they won't trust us with their education and to be honest they won't even listen to you. Anyone can be a teacher but being great is not for everybody, to achieve that you will need much more than just what you already know to teach your subject, you'll need people skills, you'll need to get to know yourself, you'll have to care about your job more than anything, you'll need to work harder each day because that's how you'll set the example for them thus your students are likely to follow your path. So the key is, be prepared, know your goal first and set the right example because they will (without a doubt) follow.

Thanks for reading.

Hugs,

Douglas Migliassi