A good teacher

[Andrew]

Dear Everyone!

I am a teacher trainee and one week later I have to teach adolescents in a Secondary School of Budapest. Can anyone give me pieces of advice in order to be a good a teacher trainee? How can I make the students to be engaged in the task that I give them? How could I integrate interdisciplinary English, means (literature, music, culture, films, arts). I think it will have a beneficial effect of student's personality to introduce themselves into English culture.
Questions concerning teaching:
1. What kind of warming-up activity can you advice?
2.What should I do if a behavioural problems explode? (I would not like to raise my voice)
3.Is it interesting for the students if a teacher speaks a lot, or I should force them to speak English in groups, or pairs?
4. What should I do if they are not motivated? If they are inhibited, unwilling to do the task
5. Where can I find lots of English games that wil be useful in the English classroom?

Sorry for writing a long message, but I would like to give the students a lesson that is not boring at all. Thank you for your help.

Have a nice day!

András

[Jaydhenz]

3.Is it interesting for the students if a teacher speaks a lot, or I should force them to speak English in groups, or pairs?

If you are speaking a lot about your lesson, the student may bored. You must ask them a certain question promptly. It will help a lot if your force them to speak individually.

[samueltremblay]

I think that starting a discussion about the subject you plan to work on is the best warming-up activity with secondary school students. Indeed, this is a good way to activate their prior knowledge in a stress free environment. This is important to make your students feel secure and to increase their confidence to speak English before starting your activity. Communication is always the best way to avoid behavioural problems (You should always try to talk with the students who interrupted your class; secondary school students are old enough to understand that if you act right with them). You should also try to work with jigsaw activities (a jigsaw activity is an activity in which each student of a team holds a piece of information different from his partners and necessary to achieve the goal of the task). You can find a whole bunch of these on the internet and you can always adapt them to the topic of your activity. I hope that this will help even though I’m pretty sure that you are already familiar with what is explained here. Sometimes the simpler, the better! :P

Best wishes!

[buniac]

I was a trainee too not a long time ago and I taught teenagers too. Here are some advices for your presentation.

First, as a warm-up activity, I used to do a "do now" task. It is something that they do individually at the beginning of each class. It is done in silence and it takes about 5-10 mins. It gets them back in the English environment. It can be about upcoming material or past material already seen.

If a behavior problem occurs, stay cool and calm. An altercation happened in my classroom and I dealt it by sending them to the reflection class. Then I spoke to them individually concerning what happened and settled it afterwards.

Students love to work in team, they do not like individual work. It is a good opportunity to please them but get them to practice their speaking skills. You should always include a speaking activity in your class, it is key to improve their global English skills.