If you are a teacher and you are serious about the effectiveness of your teaching, a mandatory question will always pop in your mind that how you can evaluate and improve yourself. Because no one is perfect and everyone wants to be the better version of themselves. Evaluating yourself will help you in releasing your strengths and weaknesses. Improving your learning methods will help you in making engagement in the classroom.
So, in this article, we will see how teachers can evaluate and improve themselves.
So, if you have no idea where to start, you can simply start by self-observation. You can make some bullet points for your simple observations. And at the end of each topic, session, or activity you can evaluate yourself by keeping those points in mind, and do not forget to take notes on them. When you take notes consider both, positives and negatives. As by these notes, you will get to know in which area you are doing good and where you need to improve.
Another helpful way to evaluate and improve yourself is this 4W method. By this method, you can evaluate yourself with just 4 simple questions. The first W is What. You will ask yourself what happened? After the class, you will take note of all the things that happened during the class. What was on your side and what was not. The second W is Who. Ask yourself who was involved in whatever positive or negative happened during the lecture. The third W is When. In this, you will take note when any positive or negative thing happened in the class. And the last W is Why. By this, you will get to know why all those things happened.
By understanding the answers of these 4Ws, you will get an exact idea of where you have to improve yourself and what are things going in your favor so that you can keep doing those things.
As you start observing and noticing your activities you will surely get a pattern, you must notice that pattern because by this pattern you will understand in which areas you are consistently doing good and where you are consistently lacking. To improve yourself in that area you can take the help of your fellow teachers or you can also go for professional training and development.
Session recording is also a helpful way of evaluating and improving yourself. Audio and video recording of your lecture will give you everything that happened over there. Now you can observe and evaluate each small detail. By video recordings of your class, you can observe your teaching style and body language. By evaluating these recordings, you will surely find some interesting points or ideas about your teaching style. Use the tools like MeritHub Virtual Classroom Solution to record your lessons.
Students’ feedback is the most effective way of evaluating yourself. Students are the ones who directly get affected by your teaching methods. So, their feedback must matter a lot to you in evaluating and improving yourself. For taking the feedback of your students, you can simply conduct some polls, or also you can interact with them in groups. Students’ feedback is a priceless source of data that will always help you in restructuring your teaching methods.
In the end, students’ performance in the exams reflects how well they understand the subject or topic. But with the students’ it also shows how well you taught them. So, students’ grade is also a factor in evaluating and improving yourself. With the students’ performance, you will have a better illustration of your students’ academic improvement. You should then take action to improve your methods of teaching if your students are unable to perform well.
In evaluating and improving your teaching, you can also consider your colleagues’ feedback. You can ask your colleagues to watch your recordings and give their views on that. You can also discuss any particular issue that you are facing. You can also ask them to share their experiences of teaching, by this you will get to know about different views and methods that will help you in evaluating and improving yourself.
Evaluating and improving your teaching throughout your course, will surely benefit your students and increase their engagement in the classroom. We have discussed various ways to evaluate and improve yourself throughout the article. We hope you find this article helpful.