How to Be a Good Teacher

Author: Compiled by the Book Writing Group / Country:
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2003-12-01
Features: Teachers are the brightest profession under the sun. — Comenius Among all the beneficial endeavors for humanity, the foremost is the endeavor to educate people. — Rousseau Education is a great cause, and a person's destiny is determined by education. How great, how important, and how sacred the role of an educator is, because the happiness of a person's life is in his hands. — Belinsky "After the snow melts, it becomes warm." "After the snow melts, it becomes green." "After the snow melts, it becomes grass." "After the snow melts, it becomes joy." "After the snow melts, it becomes swallows." "After the snow melts, it becomes frogs." "It becomes the sun!" "It becomes a stream!" "It becomes hope!" "Flowers!" "Everything!" How good the answers are! Yes, the best answers are in the students' hearts! Good answers need the teacher to gently guide them.
3. How should we teach today?
The biggest flaw of a teacher is to constantly focus on students' flaws. Failure in teaching is making students dislike learning, while success in teaching is making students enjoy learning. The loss of students' ability to think independently is the greatest tragedy in education. A teacher who lacks scientific education cannot teach students science. One of the most precious psychological qualities of a person is self-confidence. Once a person has self-confidence, he can persevere in climbing the highest peaks of life. Therefore, it can be said that the biggest harm to a student is to harm his self-confidence, and the biggest help is to help him build self-confidence. Successful teaching is not just about letting students answer questions but more about letting them ask questions; it is not just about letting students verify the truth but more about letting them seek the truth. The biggest problem in today's classroom teaching is the "lack of questions," meaning students only know how to answer questions but not how to ask them. In fact, asking questions is far more important than answering them. Professor Li Zhengdao said well, "Learning" is about learning to ask questions, and never turn "learning" into "answering." An unskilled teacher makes the question marks in students' minds turn into periods; a skilled teacher makes the question marks in students' minds grow more. An unskilled teacher teaches students to become less skilled at asking questions, while a skilled teacher teaches students to become skilled at asking questions. A famous university president in the United States once humorously said, "If a person graduates from college and believes he understands everything, he can be awarded a bachelor's degree; if he believes he understands some things but not others, he can be awarded a master's degree; if he believes he understands nothing, he can be awarded a doctorate." A competent teacher guides students to walk, while an incompetent teacher replaces students in walking. A teacher teaching students knowledge and skills is not as good as teaching them learning methods; teaching students learning methods is not as good as letting them explore and acquire learning methods through their own efforts; letting students explore and acquire learning methods through their own efforts is not as good as letting them improve their innovative and practical abilities through their own exploration. A teacher should pursue: Making today better than yesterday in teaching! A student should pursue: Making today better than yesterday in learning! The best teacher is one who can surpass himself, and the best student is one who can surpass his teacher. The best education may not suit the students you teach, but the education that suits your students is the best education. Every teacher is a sculptor; every action he takes sculpts himself and also sculpts his students. The difference between people is not caused by the amount of knowledge they have, but by the difference in their ways of thinking. Therefore, a skilled teacher must not only teach students knowledge but more importantly, teach them ways of thinking, cultivating their innovative awareness and ability. We think great people are great because we always look up at them; we think students are naive because we always look down on them. Therefore, when teachers crouch down to look at students, they will find that students also have "greatness." To earn students' respect, teachers should first love them. Therefore, instead of saying "Respect teachers and love students," it is better to say "Love students and respect teachers." The prerequisite for educating students is to understand them, the prerequisite for understanding students is to respect them, and the prerequisite for respecting students is to love them. So, the secret to educating students well is a single word—"love."
How a teacher performs in the classroom is not only about whether he has profound knowledge but also whether he creates an atmosphere of equality, relaxation, and joy. The "teaching that nourishes like rain without a sound" is the highest level of education: when a teacher is educating students, the students do not feel that they are being educated. The most successful classroom teaching is to make students' roles shift from "listeners" to "participants" and ultimately to "collaborators." A teacher's strength of observation is not whether he can discover the strengths of top students and the flaws of underperforming students, but whether he can discover the flaws of top students and the strengths of underperforming students. It is not frightening that students have flaws, but it is frightening that students have no flaws. Tao Xingzhi once said, "Education is agriculture, not industry." That is to say, education should cultivate a variety of trees, not standardized products from an industrial assembly line.
4. Equip students with the wings of scientific methods
The scientific teaching methods of education encompass a wide range of content, and it is not the task of this book to provide a comprehensive and systematic explanation of them. Here, we only want to discuss our preliminary understanding of further achieving the scientification of teaching methods, based on the successful experiences accumulated by many teachers in implementing quality-oriented education, focusing on some of the most realistic and urgent problems.
First, it is essential to change the teaching methods that are (force-feeding), (injection), and (cramming), and actively explore and practice teaching methods that guide students to think, discover, and research independently. Under the "exam-oriented education" system, the, , and teaching methods completely place students in a passive position, turning them into machines for rote memorization, and the drawbacks are self-evident. Under quality-oriented education, teaching methods should focus on guiding students to "learn how to learn"; not only should they be good at memorizing basic knowledge but also good at raising, solving, and creating problems through thinking. Teacher Sun Weigang has always pursued making his students' minds "always in a state of vivid imagination and surging thoughts." His approach is: "Let students be the true masters of the classroom, while I stand on the sidelines as a director, turning each lesson into a play, guiding students to discover, summarize, prove, conclude, and complete things themselves." He also proposed two slogans: One is "There are no things in the world without a 'why'," encouraging students to boldly ask questions and dig deep; the other is "Students can challenge teachers and overturn their views," advocating for students to debate and stand out. Teacher Sun said: If a teacher's views are overturned, both the teacher and the students lose only errors but gain correct understanding, the development of intellectual qualities, improved thinking skills, courage, and confidence; if a student's views are wrong and cannot overturn the teacher's correct understanding, the student can also experience the deep roots of correct knowledge through the process of "being unbeaten." The above examples show that adopting skeptical, discovery-based, and research-oriented teaching methods is highly beneficial for comprehensively improving students' qualities and cultivating creative talents, and thus deserves strong promotion.
Second, it is essential to change teaching methods that lack practical effectiveness and increase students' burden, and actively explore and practice teaching methods that improve teaching efficiency and reduce students' burden. Under the "exam-oriented education" system, students suffer from excessive workload and lack of time and space for free development, which is also a widespread drawback. To solve this problem, the current educational administrative departments in China are taking measures to adjust the curriculum structure, reduce teaching content, and appropriately lower the difficulty of textbooks, which is undoubtedly necessary. At the same time, teachers should firmly abandon various outdated teaching methods that are "fruitless" and put in real effort to improve teaching effectiveness. Teachers from Yantai Longkou Experimental Primary School have provided excellent experiences in solving the difficult problem of teaching composition. After careful research, they allocated one-fifth of teaching time to free reading classes, increasing students' reading volume to five times that of textbook reading. This broadened students' horizons and enriched their minds. On the other hand, they promoted the accumulation of writing materials and the enhancement of writing skills through various lively and active forms, such as guiding students to write reading notes, publish handwritten newspapers, practice impromptu writing, and experience life outside school. Through this major reform in teaching methods, students' psychological burden of "fearing composition" was eliminated, and their learning interest was enhanced. Almost all students in grades three and above in the school could write a well-praised thematic composition without preparation or outlines in just five minutes.