College of Pension Actuaries

If you’re a tutor or a teacher, you’re likely interested in finding out how you can become better at your job. The idea that great teachers are born and not made is untrue – there may be some teachers that naturally have the skills and talents that make them a great teacher, but that does not mean other people who don’t naturally have those talents can’t develop them. Even without natural ability you can develop the abilities that will make you a great teacher, it’s just going to require some extra effort.

1. Great tutors are organized and prepared.

This is an easy characteristic to understand and it is also easy to develop in yourself. Even if you’re not naturally organized, you can develop this skill – it’s as simple as following a checklist of things to do to before and after each class or tutoring session and having the discipline to follow the checklist.

Being organized includes developing a long-term plan before the start of a semester, individual class plans before each class, and follow-up after each class to analyze what went well and what needs improvement for next class. It’s also important to have the tools to stay organized. This includes a calendar, lesson plans and lesson notes for your students.

2. Great tutors engage students and motivate them to learn.

Students learn in different ways, they have different attention spans and different things interest them. Great teachers understand this and they try to teach material in a way that relates to the students interests to make it personally relevant for each one. First, try to find out what interests your students, next try to tie the concepts you’re teaching to what the students find interesting. Your students will find it much easier to learn new material when it relates to something they’re passionate about.

There are all sorts of misconceptions about what it is like to attend online school. In a lot of ways it is the same as if you were attending a traditional school and in other ways it is not. You are the only one who can decide which learning style is right for you. While you are thinking about it, lots of questions and concerns may come to your mind. This article will examine common mistakes that online students make. Hopefully this list will give you a better understanding of what online education can be like and help you avoid some of the pitfalls.

One of the major mistakes that students make is not having good time management. This is especially true if you are an online student. By attending online classes, you do not have “set” times that you have to be sitting in class taking notes. So by not having to be somewhere, it is easy to let other worldly distractions to take your attention away from your studying. Just like you have to put in the time in a traditional class, you have to do the same with an online class. Your computer cannot absorb the information for you. It will take a lot of dedication. My advice is set a certain amount of time each week to tackle your school work. Make sure you stick to your schedule and you will do fine.

The cornerstone of any education initiative is to ensure that class time won’t be wasted on non-beneficial activities, such as simply showing a movie to pass the time. Over the years there has been no single method more widely misunderstood and grossly misused than using movies in the classroom. For some, the mere mention of the word “movie” in a classroom environment is a dirty word. For others, the act of showing a movie in class is simply viewed as un-acceptable behavior by a teacher. These reactions unfortunately deprive teachers of an important educational tool, the feature film.

In fact, every day in classrooms throughout the nation teachers are energizing their students, enriching their lesson plans, and getting better performance on assignments by occasionally using quality movies in the classroom. They do this in response to changes in society, attributed in part to technological innovations, that have rendered traditional teaching methods ineffective.

Today, electronic devices like portable computers, mobile smart phones, tablets and PDAs are ubiquitous. The new generation is often rightly referred to as the “screened-age.” And it is true that the majority of media and story-based content on the electronic devices that dominate our age is delivered through a screen, be it a movie screen, TV screen, computer screen or mobile phone screen. In every day use written text are being limited to the technical and the old-fashioned.

Thus, a problematic situation was created. The average ELA class is designed to analyze written works, not screened productions. At this point, the teacher is starting at a significant disadvantage because they are competing for the attention of a student against devices and stories designed to do just that by the very best minds in our society. This affects students’ motivation to pay attention in class. Who wants to learn about the literature of the past using the technology of the past? This is due to the fact that both the method of delivery and the material are of no significant relevance to the daily life of today’s student.