Two (2) Crucial Mistakes Teachers usually make

written by Aziza Restu Febrianto

Professional teachers from any level ideally have to meet the standard qualifications set by the institution as well as the country. And of course, besides giving them trainings, the institution is really responsible for the monitoring and evaluating. Trainings inspire the teachers to improve their skill and competence of teaching. Monitoring and evaluation work on the maintenance.

Without trainings, monitoring, and evaluating, teachers with their routine teaching activities might make some crucial mistakes that affect the quality of education in school. The following is an example of two crucial mistakes usually made by teachers in common.

1. Job - Oriented

Many teachers consider that teaching is their professional job. Talking about job, the employers work and get the salary. All teachers must be professional, of course. But it does not mean that for the sake of professionalism, they tend to pay much more attention to how much money they can earn from teaching. Instead, they are indeed concerned with their competence and skill development. Obviously, teaching and lecturing are two different things. As a lecturer teaches college students in class, what he/ she has to do is just transferring information. Meanwhile, a teacher is not only responsible for giving information, but also he/ she has to get close to their students for personal guidance and understanding their characters.  

   

2. Lack of Innovation and Creativity

As explained before, it is clear that innovation and creativity are the main points to create for a successful teaching. Innovation and creativity play a very important role here. They determine whether the instruction is interesting to follow or not. When a teacher just transfers knowledge and explains the lesson without including various strategic approaches like game, singing, peer discussing, etc, a couple minutes later, he/ she will be very boring. In this case, there is no difference between teaching and singing to let the students fall asleep in class then.

As teaching is only considered to be a professional job without concerning about the teacher’s role, responsibility, and dedication, it will finally affect on the way he/ she teaches in class. And of course, as a result, the class teaching and learning will be lack of innovation and creativity and they won’t be interesting anymore for the students.  

Therefore, it is obvious that teaching is not only transferring knowledge and information, but it also includes personal guidance, understanding the students’ characters, creating attractive methods and so on.