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The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education defines dispositions as "the values, commitments, and professional ethics that influence behavior toward students, families, colleagues, and communities and affect student learning, motivation and development as well as the educator's own professional growth." In the long run, only through experience in the field of teaching can educators truly begin to understand the teaching competencies set forth by the NCATE. This is not to say that education classes cannot help a student learn by providing certain opportunities, however. While teacher education programs can discuss the competencies, students need the opportunity to put the competencies into practice. For example, we can talk about what it means to be reflective in a classroom, but students should take it upon themselves to be reflective of their own work on their own time. Instead of simply talking about collaborativeness, a professor may ask students to work in groups and discuss how the groups affected student learning. While teacher education classes can help teach and provide opportunities to practice most competencies, they can only be fully understood after a teacher has made an attempt to apply them in his own classroom. Music majors often need to be resilient as there is a great deal of stress involved. However, this stress level will not likely be comparable to the resilience needed in the first few years of teaching. Providing teacher education students with field experience is the best and to prepare students for teaching and putting their competencies into practice. However, there are certain competencies that even field experience will not help a teacher to understand. No one can be taught to be passionate, for example. Either you have that passion or you do not. What we can do is lead students toward an understanding of why passion is important and how they may be able to show passion in their teaching. Yet again, we can only do this by providing certain opportunities for teach education students. There is a Chinese proverb that says, “Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand.” As long as we remember this, teacher education programs can be successful in leading students to understanding dispositions. The rest is up to the students.
"In order to succeed people need a sense of self-efficiency strung together with resilience to meet the inevitable obstacles and inequities of life." Albert Bandura
Every teacher has to be resilient to survive in the world of education. Approximately 22 percent of teachers leave the profession within their first year. Teaching is a stressful job, the pressures of personal goals, school, state, and national standards, difficult children, difficult parents, all of these things add up and can take a lot out of a teacher every day. The important thing is for teachers to push through those stresses and maintain stability. There are many things teachers can do to be resilient. - Develop a network of support and resources
- Remember that you will learn more in the first year or so of teaching than ever in your own education
- Do not try to do everything, but do try to be involved in the community
- Plan ahead, but be flexible
- Do not be afraid to ask for help or advise
- Take time for yourself
- Keep a file of notes and things to brighten your day
- Remind yourself of what teaching is all about
The following are websites with more information on reducing teacher stress:
Advice for First-Year TeachersSurvival Strategies for New TeachersAvoiding Teacher BurnoutWhat to Expect15 Stress-Busting Tips From TeachersTeacher Staff Survival Kits
"...God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble." James 4:6, NRSV
A teacher that practices humility always puts his students first. Only if he has his students' best interests at heart will those students be able to respect him as a teacher. There are many very young children that will believe anything you tell them. Unfortunately, sometimes teachers are wrong. Though it is important that teachers are confident in their subject areas, if a teacher is wrong, he should humble himself and correct his mistakes. This will often be difficult for more egocentric personalities, especially if it is a students that points out the teacher's flaw. Teachers must remember that they are held accountable for what students know and do not know. If a student has learned false information or no information at all, it is the teacher's responsibility to reflect on his teaching and find a solution.
In addition to teaching the facts, teachers are also held accountable for their teaching philosophies and styles. A good teacher must also humble himself by understanding that his particular teaching styles will not always be effective for every student. And again, he must reflection why that may be, and what he can do to change that when necessary. Ethics are also a part of the humility a teacher must accept. Even if a teacher may personally disagree with a school's code of ethics, he must still remember to keep the students best interests at heart. The same goes for other teaching philosophies such as how a teacher chooses to deal with behavior and other aspects of classroom management.
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it's the only thing that ever has." Margaret Meade
Collaboration is extremely important for music teachers. Because music is such a progressive subject, it is crucial that music teachers not only communicate with others in the same building, but with all music educators in the district. If teachers of younger students can work toward goals st by teacher of older students, most of the students will be on the same level when they get to the next school. It is important that music educators work toward common goals. This will include planning, implementing, evaluating, and process improving. Also, if the music teachers are unified, the students that come together in high school for music ensembles will be able to be more unified as well. Teachers should also use their peers as resources outside of their districts, by attending conferences and participating in other events in which teachers can share their experiences. In addition t teachers collaborating amongst themselves, they should provide students with opportunities to collaborate. By bouncing thoughtful ideas off of each other, students can both learn more about the subject and the cultures of other students. Collaborating will allow them to use some of the higher thinking strategies.
One of the best things a music teacher can do for his students is to have them play or sing in small ensembles. Aside from learning musicianship, students learn that in these small group settings, the each member of the ensemble depends on everyone else. This helps the students develop independence because there will typically only be one person on a part. Small ensembles also teach students about teamwork. Opportunities for collaboration amongst students and teachers will lead to the strengthening of a music program on all levels, and students' learning will improve.
Collaboration at its finest: Giant Piano
Teachers with efficacy are driven toward high results and achievement. They hold high expectations for their students. Highly effective teachers, however, are not those that set impossible standards. They expect only the best performance the students can give, while providing the students with the tools they need in order to achieve. By instilling self-awareness, persistence, and other work ethics in students, teachers are able to encourage their students to become highly motivated to achieve their own goals.
Erik Erikson said, "Children cannot be fooled by empty praise and condescending encouragement...ego identity gains real strength from wholehearted and consistent recognition of real accomplishment, that is, achievement that has meaning in the culture." Many people believe that one of the problems with today's society is that we are too indulgent with our children. We give in to what they want. We let them get away with improper behavior. And, we reward them for simply doing the things they are normally expected to do. This overindulgent behavior often results in lazy, unmotivated, and overconfident students who are unprepared for the "real world" that is full of competition. Students can only grow to be successful adults when they become self-directed, motivated, and goal-oriented. Teachers who teach with efficacy will give students these tools to better prepare them for that outside world.
For more insight, click here: Rewards in the Classroom.
Inventiveness is an escalating need now more than ever in our 21st century schools. New technologies and the more wide-spread integration of cultures and learning abilities, all of these things require teachers to be creative. To come up with new teaching strategies and other means of getting information to students, a teacher must be innovative, be able to think on the spot. A bit of wittiness is almost required at times. Especially in my field of music, inventiveness and creativity are essential. We as music teachers must be creative in our ways of interpreting and teaching music. We must ask ourselves, "How can we bring a sense of freshness to this music?" For music teachers, creativity is required for writing lesson plans, putting together a program, writing choreography or marching band drill, etc.
It is also crucial, though, that we inspire creativity in our students. For students of music, creativity is necessary for composition, improvisation, musical interpretation, etc. Inventiveness is critical for any child. Creative people are the leaders in this fast-paced and changing world; they are engineers, entertainers, scientists. Yet, as the world seems to seek more and more creativity, our schools are taking it away. Arts in the schools are rapidly loosing funding and being cut from school 
budgets. And we seem to only be looking toward achieving high scores in areas such as math and language. The pressures of schools and workplaces stigmatize mistakes until we are afraid to be wrong. In his talk on creativity in schools, Sir Ken Robinson said, "If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original." I completely agree. These factors produce a diminished creativity level of children on schools. In order to help combat this, it is important to realize that creativity is just as necessary a skill, if not more so, as math skills for example. Creativity is necessary for every subject in school, and every subject should emphasize this. It is necessary that we continue to allow the arts to be prominent in our schools.
The following is a list of other helpful teacher blogs:
Mrs. Cassidy's Classroom Blog - hands-on activities
Docere Est Discere - student teacher
The Teaching Palette - art teacher
Creating Lifelong Learners - technology savvy
Digital Anthology - special-ed
A Year of Reading - children's books
Classroom Solutions - problem-solving
A reflective teacher is constantly evaluating the effectiveness of his instruction. He is always striving toward the larger goals of education while finding ways to improve the means of achieving them. Knowing that he is held accountable for the achievement of his own students, he must find ways to reach everyone. He notices when his teaching strategies are not effective on all of his students. He asks questions about how he is teaching versus how his students learn.
How do we go about reflecting on our own teaching? Possible ideas include observing students' scores, asking for students' feedback, recording or filming instruction, and keeping personal notes.
Unfortunately, just because a teacher is reflective, does not mean he will grow to be more effective. In order to come up with new strategies, he must reflect on what has worked in the past and what has not worked. Using a constructivist approach, he recalls how his students best learned past concepts and decides to use teaching strategies that will play to his students' strengths. This takes a great deal of creativity and problem solving, and occasionally very quick thinking. Not only does is a good teacher reflective of his own teaching, but he encourages reflectiveness in his students as well all other teachers.
The following websites as well as many others provide more information and ideas regarding reflective teaching:
Shaping the Way We Teach English: Reflective Teaching
The Reflective Teaching Model
Reflective Teaching: Exploring Our Own Classroom Practice
Role playing is great in some contexts but poor in others. Advantages of role playing include opportunities for critical thinking, analysis, and synthesis. Role playing should be used primarily to reinforce concepts that have already been taught, not to introduce them. A direct approach to learning is typically best to introduce new concepts. This way, the student is given structure and guidance. Then, the student can use the role playing and other instructional strategies to improve those aspects of higher learning. With role playing, a student can use the subject matter to support and argue his own opinions, further strengthening his knowledge of the content. Allowing the students' opinions, and therefore their emotions, in the classroom is important because it helps make the content relevant and therefore helps keep their interest in the subject. However, if a teacher assigns positions for the student to argue or defend, learning may be lost, because the teacher has already given the student too much information. It works best if the students come up with their own situations, arguments, and applications of the concepts. When a student is held responsible for finding his own solution or arguing his own position, he must use the skills of higher learning to apply the content. This is one of the most valuable aspects of learning, for a student to self-teach and reinforce the concepts learned in the classroom.
Our Ed Psych classes were recently assigned a role playing project in which we were to argue for or against a "No Child Left Behind" proposal at a town hall meeting. With little overview of the issue on hand, we were each assigned various positions to take including the teachers union, taxpayers, parents, college students, local businesses, etc. This could have allowed us to further explore positions that were different than our own and to gain a broader perspective of the content. Unfortunately, the description of the positions gave too much information for us to be able to discover the argument for that position on our own. If I had assigned the project myself, my goal would have been to teach the positive and negative effects of "No Child Left Behind." But it seemed to me that the professors were trying to emphasize who was paid attention in the meeting. Because of this, I saw how people may tend to pay closer attention to the people who are in favor of the issue and take little to no suggestions from those who oppose. I think that if there was more instruction in the first place, and weren't given so much information on the people we were to be representing, we would have been able to bring better discussion to the meeting, and we would have learned the concepts better. The key to role playing in the classroom should be that students can use the concepts they have learned in the classroom with their previous knowledge and experiences to further reinforce those concepts.
Passion is what I consider to be the single most significant teacher disposition that affects student learning, to which I relate most other dispositions. A passionate teacher demonstrates excitement, enthusiasm, and optimism for his subject. Without this, there can be no hope for the student to reflect that passion. Without optimism, a student will not want to learn, and without excitement and enthusiasm, a student will be bored. W.B. Yeats says, "Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire." A lack of passion leads teachers to attempt to fill a child's brain with fact, probably to be forgotten after the test. But with passion, a teacher can light a fire in the student, ignite in the student, a passion to learn himself. This can also work in reverse. A student can be interested in a subject at the start of the class. But, if the teacher is not passionate about his subject, the student can quickly loose interest and willingness to learn. The bottom line? A teacher who teaches with passion can be a bad teacher, but no teacher that teaches without passion can be an affective teacher.
That inner voice has both gentleness and clarity. So to get to authenticity, you really keep going down to the bone, to the honesty, and the inevitability of something.Meredith Monk
Being authentic is more than just being honest. It is about being open and honest, down to your core, being genuine and real. Oprah Winfrey calls it "a spirit-to-spirit connection." We often hear about "fake" teachers that the students can often see right through. These teachers just do not seem to care, not about their subjects or their students. This lack of authenticity has a negative effect on the students. How can they be expected to fully grasp a subject, when the teacher does not even seem to care? Sometimes teaching can be exhausting, but there should be absolutely no excuse for a lack of authenticity. This does not mean that a teacher should put on a face for his class. On the contrary, a teacher should never need a mask because no matter how difficult teaching may be, the student is the most important, and deserves genuine truth. A teacher who teaches with authenticity teaches through the genuine enthusiasm that he holds for his subject and his students-no masks, just truth.
To show compassion is to show sympathy. A teacher should try to make every child feel comfortable and happy in the classroom. If a teacher shows compassion in his classroom with the intention of understanding and sympathizing with the children, he will ultimately be making a positive difference in the children's lives. The Dalai Lama said, "If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion." Therefore, by the teacher practicing compassion, the students should be happier. By making the students happier, the teacher is helping to improve the students' quality of life.It is important for a teacher to be compassionate, but it is crucial for a teacher to teach students how to be compassionate toward others. One of the most important aspects of public school is that children are put into an environment in which they may learn social skills in situations that may not otherwise be available until later years. When a student learns to be compassionate for another student, not only does it allow both students to be happier, but it allows learning to take place. Compassion in a classroom can help provide three of the five levels on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs of Learning: esteem, belongingness, and safety. Because the goal of education is that students learn, compassion in the classroom is essential.
I do not have any anecdotes about compassion in the classroom. I have never really had teachers that have had the need to show me a great deal of compassion. But, I was looking around on the internet and found this video, Children Full of Life. Though I do not see evidence of anything that may be part of any standard curriculum, I do see quite a bit of learning taking place. These students have learned to open up toward each other, relate to each other, and be supportive of each other. Now, the young girl who lost her father has learned that she can share how she feels and be accepted amongst her peers, an essential quality in order for learning to take place.
When we first hear the word respect in regards to the classroom, we often think of how the teacher controls the classroom environment. However, respect should go three ways: from student to teacher, from teacher to student, and among students. At the very least, to show respect is to show regard or consideration for something or someone. The Luther College Education Department defines respect as showing appropriate regard for the needs, ideas, and experiences of others. In the classroom, being respectful is more or less showing consideration, being polite, etc. But, respect is about more than a student not talking out of turn or a teacher not raising his voice. It has all to do with attitude. Students and teachers should not only show respect in verbal communication, but other forms of communication, especially body language. You can often tell a great deal about how a person feels by observing his body language. Good posture, solid eye contact, and an interested facial expression, while not necessarily required, can all be signs of respect.
Without respect, both the students and the teacher can feel unhappy, frustrated, and even threatened. The teacher may feel like he has lost control of his classroom if students are disrespecting him or each other. Students may feel discouraged, insecure, or possibly unsafe. Not only does disrespect cause these negative feelings that can greatly affect the mentality of either student or teacher. Disrespect is disruptive to the learning process as well.
Because of the unlimited possibilities that could occur in a disrespectful environment, it is crucial that the teacher and the class immediately establish guidelines for showing respect in the classroom. Some teachers may prefer to just tell their students what their classroom rules are. I don't feel that this will properly teach the students the meaning and proper ways to show respect. I would recommend that the teacher and the students work together to write some sort of class covenant. For example, have students discuss how they would or would not want to be treated, and write down those guidelines to be displayed somewhere in the classroom. This will allow the students to think about what they would want for themselves before they show any disrespect. It is important that the teacher remember to set a good example of respect as well. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil." I am sure there have been times when nearly everyone has felt disrespected by a teacher at one point or another. The teacher should try to communicate on the student's level or higher, and be sure to avoid talking down to a student.
The bottom line is that every single person should feel respected and therefore comfortable in the classroom environment. Without respect, the students cannot benefit from their education without disruptions.
