Effective Classroom Skills for Novice Teachers

The initial challenge for novice teachers is to acquire the basic classroom skills needed to present and navigate their lessons. Teaching from this perspective is an act of performance, and for a teacher to be able to carry herself through the lesson, she has to have a repertoire of techniques and routines at her fingertips. These include routines and procedure for such things as:

• Opening the lesson
• Introducing and explaining tasks
• Setting up learning arrangements
• Checking students’ understanding
• Guiding student practice
• Monitoring students’ language use
• Making transitions from one task to another
• Ending the lesson

What we normally mean by the term teacher training refers to instruction in basic classroom skills such as these, often linked to a specific teaching context. Training involves the development of a repertoire of teaching skills, acquired through observing experienced teachers and through practice teaching in a controlled setting using activities such as micro-teaching or peer teaching. Good teaching from a training perspective is viewed as the mastery of a set of skills or competencies.

This view of the process of teaching has been extended through research on teacher cognition.

As teachers accumulate experience and knowledge there is thus a move toward a degree of flexibility in teaching and the development of what is sometimes called “improvisational teaching.” A research reviewed by Borg and others hence describes some of characteristics of expert teachers:

• They have a wide repertoire of routines and strategies that they can call upon.
• They are willing to depart from established procedures and use their own solutions and are more willing to improvise.
• They learn to automate the routines associated with managing the class; this skill leaves them free to focus on content.
• They improvise more than novice teachers – they make greater use of interactive decision making as a source of their improvisational performance.
• They have more carefully developed schemata of teaching on which to base their practical classroom decisions.
• They pay more attention to language issues than novice teachers (who worry more about classroom management).
• They are able to anticipate problems and have procedures available to deal with them.
• They carry out needed phases more efficiently, spending less time on them.
• They relate things that happen to the bigger picture, seeing them not in the context of a particular.