DEVELOPING COMPETENCE AS A TEACHER

TEACHERS TRAINING PROGRAMME ORGANIZED BY THE
IMPACT MAKERS CREATIVITY SERVICES COMPANY®
FOR KINGDOM STARS STANDARD SCHOOLS IDIROKO ROAD SANGO OTA, OGUN STATE.

…Efficient Services with Integrity.





DEVELOPING COMPETENCE
AS A TEACHER

BY DANIEL OLUKAYODE JACOBS
Chief Executive/Principal trainer Impact Makers Creativity Services Company


Motivation and Leadership for Teachers
• Motivational skills
 Human Behaviour
 Time Management
 Mentoring
 Strategy and Tactics
 Change
 Style
 Training and Development.

OBJECTIVES
1. To help teachers develop leadership skills.
2. To expose teachers to a life of personal responsibility.
3. To help them cultivate a life of reading, observations, reasoning and challenging their mind for great exploit in life.
4. To help them develop communication, emotional intelligence and inter personal skills needed to train up their pupils.






INTRODUCTION
The teaching profession is one that requires that the teacher employ great motivational skills in building a lasting future for their students. In developing teaching skills, there is need to motivational skills and techniques. Motivation is key to becoming a leading teacher.

Motivation is typically defined as the forces that account for the arousal, selection, direction, and continuation of behaviour. Nevertheless, many teachers have at least two major misconceptions about motivation that prevent them from using this concept with maximum effectiveness.

A potential teacher must exhibit the following traits if he/she must be successful:

i. Have faith in the students.
ii. See all the students in the same light.
iii. Be driven by compassion.
iv. Be passionately interested in the success of the entire student.
v. Be genuinely interested in the future success of the student.
vi. Be willing to help each student overcome their weakness.
vii. Constantly invest personal self – improvement.
viii. Exhibit only positive attitudes before the students.

One misconception is that some students are unmotivated.

As long as a student chooses goals and expends a certain amount of effort to achieve them, he is, by definition, motivated. What teachers really mean is that students are not motivated to behave in the way teachers would like them to behave.

Many factors determine whether the students in your classes will be motivated or not motivated to learn.

Here are some views on student motivation.

1. Behavioural Views of Motivation.
a. This reveals the reason why some students react favourably to particular subjects and dislikes others. For instance, some students may enter a required maths class with the feeling of delight, while others may feel that they have been sentenced to prison.
b. Differences can be traced to past experiences or negative stories from older ones.
c. Students who love maths might have been shaped to respond that way by series of positive experiences with math.
d. The math hater, in contrast, may have suffered a series of negative experiences.
e. Attention and importance is placed on observation, imitation, and vicarious reinforcement.
f. A student who identifies with and admires a teacher of a particular subject may work partly to please the admired individual and partly to try becoming like that individual.
g. A student who observes an older brother or sister reaping benefits from earning high grades may strive to do the same with expectation of experiencing the same or similar benefits.
h. A student who notices that a classmate receives praise from the teacher after acting in a certain way decides to imitate such behaviour to win similar rewards.





2. Cognitive Views of Motivation.
- Cognitive views stress that human behaviour is influenced by the way people think about themselves and their environment.
- The direction that behaviour takes can be explained by four influences: the inherent need to construct an organized and logically consistent knowledge base, one’s expectations for


successfully completing a task, the factors that one believes account for success and failure, and one’s belief about the nature of cognitive ability.

3. Humanistic View of Motivation.
- The humanistic view stresses the need to understand the need of your students.
- There is the basic principle known as the five – level hierarchy of needs.
1. Psychological Needs.
2. Safety Needs.
3. Belongingness and love Needs.
4. Self esteem Needs.
5. Self – actualization Needs.

- This order reflects differences in the relative strength of each need.
- The lower a need is in the hierarchy, the greater is its strength because when a lower – level need is activated (as in the case of extreme hunger or fear for one’s physical safety), people will stop trying to satisfy a higher – level need (such as esteem or self – actualization) and focus on satisfying the currently active lower – level need.
- The first four needs (physiological, safety, belongingness and love, and esteem) are often referred to as deficiency needs because they motivate people to act only when they are unmet to some degree.
- Self – actualization, by contrast, is often called a growth need because people constantly strive to satisfy it.
- Basically, self – actualization refers to the need for self – fulfilment – the need to develop all of one’s potential talents and capabilities.
- For example, an individual who felt she had the capability to write novels, teach, practice medicine, and raise children would not feel self – actualized until all of these goals had been accomplished to some minimal degree.

The Impact of Cooperative Learning on Motivation.

- Classroom task can be structured so that students are forced to compete with one another to obtain the rewards that teachers make available for successfully completing these tasks.
- Traditionally, competitive arrangements have been assumed to be superior to the other two in increasing motivation and learning.
- In this training we will describe cooperative -, competitive, and individual learning arrangement (sometimes called goal structures or reward structures), identify the elements that make up the major approaches to cooperative learning, and examine the effect of cooperative learning on motivation, achievement, and interpersonal relationship.






Types of Classroom Reward Structures.

1. Competitive goal structures are typically norm referenced.

- This traditional practice of grading on the curve predetermines the percentage of A, B, C, D and F grades regardless of the actual distribution of test scores.
- Because only a small percentage of students in any group can achieve the highest rewards and because this accomplishment must come at some other student’s expense, competitive goal structures are characterized by negative interdependence.
- Students try to outdo one another, view classmates’ failure as an advantage, and come to believe that the winners deserve their rewards because they are inherently better.
- Some researchers have argued that competitive reward structures lead students to focus on ability as the primary basis for motivation.
- This orientation is reflected in the question “Am I smart enough to accomplish this task?”
- When ability is the basis for motivation, competing successfully in the classroom may be seen as relevant to self – esteem (since nobody loves a loser), difficult to accomplish (since only a few can succeed), and uncertain (success depends on how everyone else does).
- These perceptions may cause some students to avoid challenging subjects or tasks, to give up in the face of difficulty, to reward themselves only if they win a competition, and to believe that their own successes are due to ability, whereas the successes of others are due to luck.
- Individualistic goal structures are characterized by students working alone and earning rewards solely on the quality of their own efforts.
- The success or failure of other students is irrelevant.
- All that matters is whether the student meets the standard for a particular task.
- Individual structures lead students to focus on task effort as the primary basis for motivation (as in “I can do this if I try”).
- Whether a student perceives a task as difficult depends on how successful she has been with that type of task in the past.

2. Cooperative goal structures are characterized by students working together to accomplish shared goals.
- What is beneficial for the other students in the group is beneficial for the individual and vice versa.
- Because students in cooperative groups can obtain a desired reward (such as high grade or a feeling of satisfaction for a job well done) only if the other students in the group also obtain the same reward, cooperative goal structures are characterized by positive interdependence.
- Also, all groups may receive the same rewards, provided they meet the teacher’s criteria for mastery.
- For example, a teacher might present a lesson on map reading, and then give each group its own map and a question answering exercise.
- Students then work with each other to ensure that all know how to interpret map.
- Each student then takes a quiz on map reading.
- All teams whose average quiz scores meet a preset standard receive special recognition.
- Cooperative structures lead students to focus on effort and cooperation as the primary basis of motivation.


- This orientation is reflected in the statement “We can do this if we try hard and work together”.
- In a cooperative atmosphere, students are motivated out of a sense of obligation: one ought to try, contribute, and help satisfy group norms.

- Student motivation and performance tend to be highest for such activities as band, drama club, athletes, the school newspaper, and the year book, all of which require a team effort.
- It also good to note that cooperative – learning and reward structures are consistent with the constructivist approach that inquiry, perspective sharing, and conflict resolution.


Suggestions for Teaching in your Classroom: Motivating Students to Learn.

1. Use behavioural techniques to help students exert themselves and work toward remote goals.
2. Make sure that students know what they are to do, how to proceed, and how to determine when they have achieved goals.
3. Do everything possible to satisfy deficiency needs – physiological, safety, belongingness, and esteem.
a. Accommodate the instructional program to the physiological needs of your students.
b. Make your room physically and psychologically safe.
c. Show your students that you take an interest in them and that they belong in your classroom.
d. Arrange learning experiences so that all students can gain at least a degree of esteem.

4. Enhance the attractions and minimize the dangers of growth choices.
5. Direct learning experiences toward feeling of success in an effort to encourage an orientation towards achievement, a positive self – concept, and a strong sense of self – efficacy.
a. Make use of objectives that are challenging but attainable and, when appropriate, that involve student input.
b. Provide knowledge of results by emphasizing the positive.

6. Try to encourage the development of need achievement, self – confidence, and self – direction in students who need these qualities.
a. Use achievement – motivation training techniques.
b. Use cooperative – learning methods.

7. Try to make learning interesting by emphasizing activity, investigation, adventure, social interaction, and usefulness.

For more information
Office: 01-7348654, Direct Line: 08035690386.
E-mail: imcscconsult@gmail.com
Website: www.imcscconsult.webs.com
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