Essay on High School Teacher: Ensuring Academic Excellence and Building Coping Mechanisms

If I were a high school teacher, my priority would be to ensure that my students perform well in their academic studies. Since the academic excellence of my students is reliant on the effectiveness in which I will perform in the classroom, I would ensure that I undertake in engaging modes of teaching, which have been proven to be crucial in not only helping students achieve excellently in their classwork but also in assisting them in building coping mechanisms that will help them both in school and years on after graduation (Donnelly and Hogan, 1). Engaging students help the student to become critical beings, a skill that they will use in solving the issues that they will face in all the stages of life. This being so, I would engage my students for the sake of their present and future success.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

The first way in which I would engage my students would be maintaining a friendly yet professional tone and attitude. I would ensure that my students know that I am approachable, in an out of class and that I am there for them, while also ensuring that they know they cannot engage me in non-constructive conversations that are not within the confines of the teacher-student relationship. Secondly, I would use the try-think-pair-share method (Gray and Madson, 85). This idea calls for asking questions before attempting them, initiating the process of thinking about the answers that one gave, or was not in a position to give, pairing students to make them work together on finding the solutions and having them share their findings with the rest of the class. This style of thinking has been attributed to retention of memory, hence the assurance that my students would perform well in their academics. Finally, I would analyze the effects of the engagement that I undertake through the use of daily quizzes, as suggested by Gray and Madson (85). Quizzes daily, or at least weekly, will analyze the levels of knowledge that the students have been able to retain. Therefore I would be able to know where to give more attention and whether the teaching style or method of engagement has been effective in ensuring that my students are excelling in their current academic setting, as well as in their future endeavors.

Olson and Reece (4) intimate that engaging students is essential in ensuring that the students perform well in their studies, as well as curbing the process of disengagement, which occurs in students from an early stage. Therefore, it would be essential for me to ensure that I engage my students because of the benefits it has on their memory-retention ability as well as the ability to break the disengagement that comes with age, causing students to be disinterested in their academics. Furthermore, engagement of students helps to build the teacher-student relationship, and the teacher can notice changes in their students and therefore act accordingly. Engagement of students has been used in rescuing at-risk students who feel secure around their teachers due to their style of engagement-based teaching.

Conclusion

During my time as a student, the teachers were unapproachable and disinterested in the well-being of their students. They behaved as if we were in military school, and therefore they would bark orders at the students. If they failed to respond accordingly, we were flogged due to general the acceptance of corporal punishment back then. It is for these reasons that students during my time experienced elevated stress levels, were less friendly with their teachers and fellow students, and the rates of dropping out of school were higher than those reflected in the current school setting. Therefore, the level of teacher-student engagement today is commendable compared to that of the past.

Works Cited

Donnelly, Paul F., and John Hogan. "Engaging Students in the classroom:'How can I know what I think until I see what I draw?'." European political science 12 (2013): 365-383.

Gray, Tara, and Laura Madson. "Ten easy ways to engage your students." College Teaching 55.2 (2007): 83-87.

Olson, Amber, and Reece L. Peterson. "Student Engagement." Lincoln: University of Nebraska-Lincoln (2015).