Perceptives about Education

Teaching from the heart

Teaching requires an immense amount of conscience, commitment, and dedication from teachers. Meanwhile, one’s perseverance, passion, and energy are also the prerequisites for good teaching. On top of instilling knowledge, teachers should make sure students are gaining knowledge and skills in the process of learning. Thus, the word ‘teaching’ embeds both teaching and learning whereas the quality of teaching, to a large extent, is determined by teachers’ academic qualification and their aspiration, which students can easily sense from the level of involvement and dedication from their teachers. No matter what kinds of students teachers have to teach, they should refrain from labelling students but educate them well because every student matters. 

Perceive from Students’ Perspective

Teachers ought to be humanistic in every way. When teaching children, teachers should ask themselves to what extent they extend their empathy to their students and put themselves into children’s shoes. Knowing what your students like and how they like to learn are more important than following the conventional teaching approaches.

Help when they need; Praise when they succeed

Teachers should believe that everyone is able to learn well. Teacher should help students identify their weaknesses but keep in mind that everyone is gifted in different ways. We must be mindful that successful learning builds on confidence and personal strengths. Praising students can help them visualize their strengths, which gradually helps them develop their confidence. The way teachers look at students is also essential too. Teachers should learn to trust their students and guide them to find their ways. Once students have identified their positions, teachers should help them actualize their value and dreams.

Students with low self-esteem are the ones who are difficult to be connected and communicated with. Teachers shall safeguard students’ self-esteem, in particular that of young children. They come to school without knowing much about themselves and their strengths. The confirmation and recognition from teachers and parents will be the fuel motivating them to stretch their potential and open themselves to new things. Once they succeed, they would want to keep trying and improving by setting higher standards. Despite the fact that they may not be as good as their peers who are skilled and outstanding, with teachers’ encouragement, however, students will continue to try and improve through reflection. By the word encouragement, teachers are meant to support the young children to believe in their power, but by no means to help out through firsthand engagement. In short, teachers ought to help students find out their uniqueness and strengths, but first and foremost they should help students develop their confidence and self-esteem.

Nurturing through Teaching

Through life education, teachers educate students what makes human beings human. To a large extent, the fundamental difference between human beings and animals lies in the existence of spirit and the ability to think. Adopting meaningful texts in teaching, teachers can display not only language skills, but also social value and ethical principles for decision making. Teachers need good texts to sustain connections with students on both spiritual and emotional levels. Education in the 21^st century shall move beyond the realm of knowledge. Teachers shall help students develop critical thinking skills. Let’s take language teaching as an example. In language education, students shall be guided to learn more than the four language skills. Teachers should enrich students through moral education. When teachers are teaching the content knowledge, students will begin to exercise and organize their thinking patterns and value systems, which will influence their lives and global perspective. In this regard, language competence should take both critical and creative thinking skills into consideration. Teachers should also guide students to develop a consistent thinking mode which helps students socialize in the society successfully. In short, the ability of a teacher to guide students to think, perceive, and understand shall be the major concern in modern education.