I can't remember where I got these from. Respect to the owner!

Rules for a good teacher

1. Respect yourself and your colleagues.
2. Respect students and parents.
3. Respect rules and regulations.
4. Respect opinion of others.
5. Respect the religion and it’s habits.
6. 
7. Accept advice and work on it.
8. Accept students for what they are.
9. Accept colleagues as equals.
10. Accept your responsibilities and carry them through.
11. Accept diversity in your students and learn from them.
12. Be prepared to improve yourself in your subject.
13. Be prepared to be a life long learner.
14. Be prepared to carry our your responsibility.
15. Be prepared to share and cooperate
16. Be prepared to inform and be informed.
17. Be prepared to give constructive feed back.
18. Be compassionate to your students and colleagues.
19. Be sincere with yourself and others.
20. Be sociable with the students and colleagues.
21. Be encouraging at all times.
22. Be courteous at all times.
23. Be generous with your praises.
24. Be imaginative with your students.
25. Be creative in all your work.
26. Be innovative in your classroom.
27. Know that you have responsibility towards student, parents, and
school.
28. Know that you are accountable for all that you say and do.
29. Know that you are part of a team.
30. Know that you are special.

Ask for feedback

"The Hot Seat"!!! AAAHHHH!!! I don't know about the rest of you, but this is usually my reaction when my students get an opportunity to grade and critique ME for a change.
I think all teachers tend to get prideful and defensive of their teaching techniques and strategies after years of being in the classroom (and probably have good reason to). While I'm nowhere near being a seasoned pro, I like to humble myself before my students about halfway through the semester and ask them for feedback. This shows that I care about them and that I want to have the best possible class to help them succeed.

I usually give the students a couple questions on a handout and have them write their opinions (either in sentences or a few words, depending on their level). Included are: What is your favorite thing about this class? What is your least favorite thing about this class? What do you want to learn in this class that we haven't covered yet? What can the teacher do to improve this class? What can you do to improve this class?

I tell the students not to put their names on the papers so they can anonymously express themselves. These informal questionnaires are surprisingly beneficial to me as a teacher and to the class as a whole. Although sometimes the brutal honesty of a student's opinion can hurt my pride, I just remind myself that I'm not a perfect teacher, and never will be, but this feedback will help me strive to give my best.

A Nice Cup of Tea for the Teacher.
Here’s a way to explain about how languages are learned, and an excuse to drink a cup of tea during class!

You need 1 cup boiled water, 1 tea bag, milk, sugar and a teaspoon.

Put the teabag in the cup. Explain to the class that coming to English classes is like putting a teabag into a cup. If you leave it there long enough tea will infuse into the water. Similary, by coming to English lessons, some language will inevitably rub off on the students. Take a sip of the tea and pull a face! Yuk! Something else is needed.

Put some sugar in the tea. This represents the input, grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation. Just hearing English around you is not enough. You have to have properly explained input in measured amounts. Taste the tea again. Yuk! Something is missing.

You need to stir the tea. Just listening to the explanations is not enough. Students have to work with it, by remembering, by doing exercises,listening, reading, speaking and writing, just as they need to make an effort to stir the sugar into the tea. Taste the tea again. Not bad, but something is still missing.

Pour some milk into the tea. Just coming to classes and listening to explanations and working with them is not enough. Students need to top up their English with something else: homework!, just as tea needs topping up with milk (for the English at least!)

Finally, enjoy your cup of tea!

speak and listen

Teachers: Don't get so committed to completing all the items in your lesson plan that you don't have time to respond to students' questions--even if unrelated to the topic at hand. I had a great Advanced Grammar class yesterday. The material I'd planned went well, but something unexpected went better: a sincere question from one of the students about a totally unrelated item. It turned out that nobody in the class was really clear on this item--one/another/other/others/the other(s) --but felt it was too simple a topic to ask about.

use the news or weather forecast

News bulletins are a rich source of material
and all parts of the news can be used. The weather forecast can be a good "ice"-breaker, the way newsreaders introduce themselves, link items and sign off is a cross cultural point and the stock market report useful for the language of trends...... John F King, York UK.

Computer wizard
Did you know that you can easily make Microsoft Word produce Gap Fill exercises, multiple choice exercises and more, all at the click of a button?
With the Macro facility within MS Word you can record just about any set of instructions which you can later perform with a single click.

I have recorded Macros which can move selected words from a text to a list at the bottom of the page, randomize words or sentences, create multi-choice exercise, comprehension questions, to name just a few.

If you want a more detailed cooking instructions, drop mean email.

I'm also happy to email you a pre-cooked dish which contains the aforementioned ingredients.

Bon appetite! (Bon voyage, expensive lesson prep software!)

Attitudes Towards Educating Children
Teaching children to do as they are told is not a good enough aim for behaviour management. What I would like for children to learn to do, is to think for themselves to be considerate. Not to think what would happen to me if I got caught doing such and such a misdeed, but, what effect would my behaviour have on other people?
To learn to be considerate, children neeed to have 4 skills...
1. An autonomous or independent understanding of right or wrong – they know right from wrong whether an adult is there telling them or not.
2. To manage their emotions (even when they’re not feeling like doing something they can manage to do it).
3. We need children to co-operate with us.
4. We need children to have a sense of potency. “I can make a difference. I can make decisions that affect me and others.”
To help children think about the effects of their behaviour on others we need to make it easier for them to think about other people and make them more willing to think about other people. The way to start is to teach by example. We build a relationship with children where we are sensitive and responsive to what they need. Rewards and punishments are neither.
Rewards and punishments have us in control – we decide which behaviour is appropriate, we decide which behaviour we will change, we are in control and being in control of another person is never experienced by the recipient to be a benign event – even with praise or rewards. We know that as adults, when other people try to control us, we don’t feel that its a very positive experience.
The gist of it is to treat them as equals and not lavish praise...
An adult in ‘guidance approach’ acts as leader whereas in ‘controlling approach’, acts as boss. Adults will explain to children that they expect them to manage their emotions, to cooperate with others, to think about the effects of their behaviour on other people and when they don’t do that, adults then step in and help them take command of themselves - they won’t boss the children around.
The first thing is to teach children to notice their behaviour and the best place to start is to notice when they’re being successful. The example of when infants begin to walk and parents recognise it as an achievement.
But by age 4 they come to their pre-school teacher with a painting and ask is this any good? At one they knew how to judge their behaviour, but by 4 they don’t know anymore. They have been told what’s good and what’s not good and they have learnt to be passive.
If we want them to notice when their behaviour is thoughtless, they need to be able to notice when it is successful. This does not entail learning a new skill, because when an adult does something that we appreciate or admire, we don’t say “good boy” for doing the dishes when it was my turn, “you can have some ice cream” – instead we say “thank you, I appreciate you doing the dishes”. For children, that’s all we have to do. We don’t say “good boy” or “good girl” to our friends because that is a power imbalance. It's not up to us to judge them.

Be a friend not a teacher.
As an part-time and fulltime English teacher for a couple of years, I found that the class could be much easier and more effective if you can really treat your students as your friends rather than students, that is, to make yourself their friend rather than the teacher. It fits both in and out of classroom. You may share different ideas with them which don't have to do with the teaching contents. They will absolutely respect you more and more and get to learn much as well if you have dinner or go outing with them after class. This is one of the ant traditional teaching methods in which actually teachers were too powerful and serious before their students.

beat them senseless
Of course, I don't mean to beat them in the literal sense, but I've found that sometimes pretending to beat them up or pretending to fight them makes them warmer. This never works however with shy kids or over aggressive kids. But surprisingly, idle threats (my favorite is a pink-belly threat) work even on adults. They find it funny and it makes the environment more relaxed.
Children are a whole different game from adults, and most of these apply primarily to children, but some to adults as well and a few maybe to adults exclusively. The list on this board is already pretty complete, but here are a few of my own opinions.
-we are always a teacher and a student. If we can't learn from someone then we aren't paying attention to them. The first law of life is to always either be teaching or learning... otherwise we're just watching tv >.<
-start hard, turn soft. If you start out being easy on kids (and even adults) they develop no respect for the rules that you may want to lay down later... even if they love you. Start out militant and let them know their boundaries and your expectations... then chill out and let them run free, they'll learn to love you with a foundation of respect for your rules.
-the worst kids are the most important. I don't think that any kid is "better" or "more important" than another, but if someone has serious behaviour problems, they need more attention then the others (I realize in some cases, they are beyond our skills... or patience). Jesus said "it's not the healthy that need the healer." I'm not a christian, but he was a smart guy.
-don't let their lack of English fool you. We all know that these kids and adults are as smart or smarter than us. But sometimes instinct gets the best of us and we forget that lack of communication doesn't mean lack of thought. Difficult topics like globalization, consumer culture and economic colonization, literature, psychology, philosophy... these require difficult thoughts, but not difficult words, stretch their brains more than their vocabulary. Make them work around the words they don't know.
-teach yourself, fix yourself, be a warrior-prophet. How can you possibly teach anyone anything if you don't know who you are and where you fit in this crazy world. Our jobs may be to teach a specific subject, but if we are really teachers then we teach about life. You gotta know what you're teaching... life requires experience and a solid soul.

Clowning around
I love teaching because it allows me to clown around in class. For example, when a student make a mistake, I will smack my forehead several times with my palm, drop my mouth and then add some sound effects just like in a cartoon so the student will not be embarrassed at all while he tries to get the answer right. Children love that and it helps to liven up the class too. Sometimes, I will dramatise - shaking my buttocks or strutting around like a king .. anything just to make them laugh. It's good way to begin a lesson when there is humour thrown in right from the start. Learning a langauge through the funny use of the body will thrill anyone.

Get to know your students!
Get to know your students! Although we all know that imperfect control of a language doesn't make one an incomplete person, it's easier to remember this when we know more about a student than where he/she's from, what class she/he's in, and what language problems he/she has. Learning a bit about a student's background, interests, plans, and so on can go a very long way in making your class a more engaging, meaningful experience for all concerned. For students: Don't be afraid to make mistakes! Learning English (or any language) takes practice and more is involved than putting knowledge in your head. (Learning a language is like learning to play tennis or to play the piano. Only learning a grammar rule or the meaning of a word isn't enough.) The important thing is to use English. As you use English more and more, your confidence will increase--and so will your English ability. And remember--everyone makes mistakes. (I've been speaking English for more than 50 years and I make plenty of mistakes!)

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