TEACHER

Self

Teaching Capacity Builiding

Q. How to connect students’ prior knowledge to new knowledge?
• Provide scaffolding activities to connect what students know to what they are going to learn. The activities can be: (a) pre-teaching new vocabulary; (b) modeling academic language; and (c) supporting academic language using visuals, gestures, and demonstrations.
• Connect new contents to students’ life experiences. Students will consider the contents to be more meaningful.

Q. How to construct students’ learning under Zone of Proximal Development?
• Teacher’s guidance and students’ own exploration have to be balanced according to students’ age and developmental stages, as either too much control or too much freedom can hinder zone of proximal development.
• Give students the chance to express their ideas and follow other students’ leads in the classroom.

Q. How to cultivate students’ critical thinking and cognitive competences?
•Teachers could model the critical thinking process in the classroom,
during instruction, through assignments, in preparing for assessments, and in the content of the assessment itself.

Q. How to respond to prompt questions that you don’t know answers?
• If students ask questions that are beyond teacher’s preparation, try your best to answer them. If you fail to, admit that this is beyond your scope/preparation and promise students that you will find the answer and advise them later.

Q. How to manage Q&A in class?
• Distinguish which questions need answering. Such judgement is based on the learning objectives, class contents/focus, and students’ language proficiency.
• Prolong the time before students give answers to questions so as to allow mental process.

Q. What can you contribute to a collaborative teaching group?
Recommendation: actively collaborate with colleagues, respect different ideas and incorporate teachers of different background.
Activities:
• With your colleagues, share your experiences and reflections on instructional approaches and methodologies, and also listen to their opinions and ideas.
• Be open to different views, do not take it personally and feel insulted.
• Acknowledge others’ strengths, and value the unique expertise provided by various members of the team.
• Invite both newcomer teachers and experienced teachers to join in the teaching team, to help make the team more diverse. Newcomer teachers can share new teaching techniques or theories and may have a better understanding about the school and colleagues from experienced teachers. Experienced teachers can provide guidance and support to newcomer teachers, and can incorporate any new teaching approaches and methodologies into their teaching.

Q. What are some national professional organizations?
• American Education Research Association (AERA): this national research society strives to advance knowledge about education, to encourage scholarly inquiry related to education, and to promote the use of research to improve education and serve the public good.

• American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL): this council is dedicated to the improvement and expansion of the teaching and learning of all languages at all levels of instruction.

Q. What are some Texasian professional organizations?
• Texas Association for Bilingual Education (TABE): this association pursues the implementation of educational policies and effective bilingual-bicultural programs that promote equal educational opportunity and academic excellence for Bilingual/ESL students.

• Texas State Teachers Association (TSTA): this association unites, organizes and empowers public education advocates to shape public education in Texas thus providing a quality public school for every child.

Q. How to become a teacher leader?
Recommendation: Be familiar with the content subject you teach, seeking for improvement; always discuss and share knowledge with others.
Activities:
• Promotes sharing of instructional methods among colleagues, organizing discussion and seek to solve instructional and management issues, this can happen in your office, at teacher conference or any other appropriate occasions.
• A teacher leader should be very familiar with the subject content that he/she teaches, he/she knows what resources and materials are needed and can gather them.
• Mentorship is not just for subject coaches, teachers who have adequate teaching experience or have acquired advanced pedagogical skills should be encouraged to disseminate their knowledge and techniques.
• Catalyst for change: teachers working in school cite shall always identify issues and actively act on them. “never content with the status quo but rather always looking for a better way” (Larner, 2004, p32).”

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