A New Year Makeover

Recently, I organised a makeover session for my sisters-in law and my husband’s nieces because I was tired of giving them the same humdrum Christmas gifts. The session turned out to be quite a hit and the ladies, ranging from 24 to 58 years old, left the session with new ideas on how to improve their dressing styles. All made resolutions to overhaul their wardrobes and their looks for the coming year. Being properly groomed and dressed is not just a matter of being vain. Let’s face it; nowadays, looking the part is just as important as being able to do the job.

Every year, I do a personal makeover too. But this is not a matter of getting a new wardrobe or a new look. Instead, I give my courses and my teaching a makeover. I try to think of new ways to organise my courses and create new activities for my teachers. Sometimes I add new materials and throw out the old. Other times, I try to recall what has worked and what didn’t, and I trim the latter from my classes.

New teachers attending my course may not even know that I have modified or changed the course so it’s not for them that I do this makeover. It’s for me. A makeover gives me a fresh approach to the course; it keeps me interested and engaged in the subject. I often get asked about how teachers keep things interesting and fresh when they teach the same subject for over thirty years. I don’t know how others do it but for me, teaching is always exciting because I teach different students all the time. Meeting and working with different learners every year helps keep my job exciting because I can never predict how new students will react to me and to how I teach the subject. I remind myself that I am teaching people, not a dry subject or dry facts, and people are always unpredictable.

Every year too, I learn something new about what I am teaching, and this fresh understanding contributes to a novel approach to teaching the topic. So I develop more courses every now and then, and I try to deliver these in different ways. True, I sometimes fail, but this constant experimentation helps to keep the teaching spark alive.

So as you work your way into the new term, think about giving your teaching a makeover. I gave this topic some thought and came up with 8 ideas for you to consider here.

8 tips for giving your teaching a makeover.

1. Update your materials. Change your Powerpoint presentations. Create a new template for your worksheets or change the look of your materials. Don’t let them look exactly like last year’s.

2. Clean out your workspace and throw out stuff and papers you no longer need. There isn’t that much space in your cubicle anyway, and a cluttered cubicle only blocks the good chi from flowing smoothly.

3. Introduce a new routine into your classroom. If you’ve never read to your pupils, begin your lesson by doing this. If you’ve never made much use of your bulletin boards, begin posting some of your students’ work up there. Start taking pictures of your students and their work with your mobile phone camera. Do something you’ve never done before.

4. Pull out your notes from all the workshops you attended last year. Consciously apply one idea that you’ve learnt from the workshop into your lessons. Work at it for a term and see what results you get. Then begin working with another idea. Profit from all the time you’ve spent in professional development.

5. Read a book about your subject. If you are a literacy teacher, read a new book about teaching reading, writing or a related literacy topic. If you’ve always depended on one book as reference, make a conscious effort to look for another book.

6. Work together with a colleague to begin a reading group to actively read and discuss new ideas in teaching and learning. Working collaboratively to create new lesson plans, to co-teach or to do some action research are all ways to give your work a new dimension.

7. Join a professional organisation and try to be active in it. Being a part of a professional organisation says that you value the idea of a community of professionals with like minds.

8. Plan to attend a conference this year if you have never done so. And when you have attended one, offer to share your experience and learning at your staff contact time. Be the lifelong learner that you read about all the time.

I am sure you may have many other ideas about how you can give your work a makeover. Do share your ideas. And while you are mulling over the ideas I’ve suggested, may I add that a style makeover is not a bad idea too? Teachers should do their job well, and there’s no harm at all if they do this while looking good.