Your Commitment
Yes the school has to have comitmment but what about YOU. It is you that the students see day in and day out. It is you that they first go to for help. It is you that see when a student is down or not feeling weel. Do you ever take the time to stop and ask hey whats wrong can I help. Sometimes you will get no answer but guess what just your asking has made that person realize that you care. We are the frontline in the education departments of where we work. With this we need to be the ones who show and actually care about the students because if it goes to another department, well our credibility has already taken a dive. Remember school commitment is good but YOUR commitment is just if not more important.
as an instructor the students will pick up on your commitment to them, to the school. we need to be role models if we are commited then we are more credable. the bottom line is "if my instructor is not commited? then why should i be?
Not all informal leaders will follow the prescribed course. Identifying those people and managing their influence can be a challenge. How are you overcoming the older student's influence?
I agree with what you said about one negative comment wipes out a lot of good ones because we are going through that right now with a student. He is a little older and can easily influence some of the other students who are younger.
I agree, most students tend to be more on the negative side anyway. I try to be a positive influence to my students, so that they have an example to live by. I try to interject positive concepts in everything I do and I challenge them to find a positive in everything they do.
I find this to be true becouse each student will have a different experiance from one clas to another.
I hear comments like that instructor is cool becouse he does not care about the rules or he does things his way not by the book,0r I might hear, that instructor was just fun and I learned alot in that class or another instructor is to strict so he is not a good instructor.
It is a good thing to be creative and to keep changing the class up to hold the students interest.But on the other hand it can pose quite a challenge when it comes to class controll and being able to deliver information effectively in the next class.Students can find that different aproaches can be quite a turn off.
Now you not only have to help them to be an active partrticapent in their education but you have to brake down the aditional barierers that have arisen from the different ways of managing the classroom.
I do not think we are doing our jobs by not challenging are students to do better work or to act in a professional manner.At times it seems that they have learned how to manipulate the sytem better than they have learned to master the information that they came to school for.
We all need to be Professional roll models and teach them that following the rules and excelling in our work is somthing that will help them to be successfull in reaching their goals in a very competative work place.That we care what happens to them after they have left our classes.
The school is just a collection of "YOU"s. Each person shapes the student's perception of the school. Unfortunately, one negative experience will wipe out a whole bunch of positive ones.
