Dec 5, 2013
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Have you feel bored and demotivated to learn in the classroom? Perhaps the teacher in your classroom did not using learning-focused classroom. According to Egen and Kauchack (2011) there are four components that can be used to promote students’ motivation in learning which are self-regulation, teacher characteristics, climate variables, and instructional variables. Here, I want to focus on the teacher characteristics. Teacher characteristics also contains several items such personal teaching efficacy, modelling and enthusiasm, caring and teacher expectation.
Personal teaching efficacy, it is
related with teacher’s belief that can influence all students. The teacher
should believe that his students can success in the learning process with or
without prior knowledge. In my opinion, it will be better for students to have
prior knowledge about the topic that the teachers are going to teach, because
it helps learners to construct a concept from the topic and success in the
learning process.
Modelling and enthusiasm, it is communicating genuine interest. Everything
what the teachers do can have powerfull impact to the student. If the teachers
look enthusias in the learning process, it can influence the students
motivation to learn in the classroom because the student modelling the teacher.
Through this characteristic the teacher easily can influence the student even
only from something that the teacher just say like give the students
motivational word. From the word that students hear, there is a big possibility
they will imitate and make it as their belief or mindset in their own thinking.
The next characteristic of good
teacher is caring, to show this characteristic the teacher should meet the
students needs for belonging and relatedness to show their respect to the
students. In my experience, there are some teacher who could not
remember their students’ name one by one. For me, knows the students’ name one
by one is very important for the teacher, moreover it is also one of simple
ways to communicate caring even there are still many ways to communicate caring
such eye contact, smile, using gesture,
spend time with the students and etc.
The last characteristic of good
teacher is teacher expectation. Teacher expectation increasing perception of
students’ competence. As teachers, we must set expectation for our students after they learn
something new, we should
expect that they can understand the learning process and reach the lesson
objective. Rosenthal (1973), suggest some treatments in learning process to the students as
mediating factors, like: socio-emotional climate, input, response opportunity,
and feedback. Set high
expectation to students also relates to students’ self-fulfilling prophesy. According
to Robert Merton, self-fulfilling prophesy means that erroneous beliefs about
people can bring about the realization of those beliefs. For example, the
teacher says to the students that he does not have the ability to do something,
then the student will eventually start to behave as what his teacher expects.
For me, as teacher candidate, I will set high expectation
to the students that they can do what I expect, can get
what I expect and can understand
the learning process, and reach the lesson objective also.
