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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.
