One of the complaints made by teachers is the lack of public respect for the profession. While it is virtually impossible to cause a one-hundred-eighty degree change in public opinion overnight, there are certain things that any teacher can do to hone their image inside and outside the classroom. Consider the following tips:
1) Identify the various instructional strategies you use regularly in the classroom and structure your classroom accordingly. Most elementary teachers have this skill down to a science, but our secondary-level colleagues tend to trail in this respect. Classroom decorations should no longer serve just for aesthetics, but as daily teaching and resource tools for students. Allow your instructional strategies to dictate the order and décor of your classroom. For example, if you utilize journal writing, perhaps you can create a journal station, complete with writing tip posters and a bin for students’ journals. If vocabulary is pertinent in your classroom, create an interactive word wall in a visible area around your classroom. Invest in or create your own posters that display information or resources that are specific to your curriculum.
2) Communication is pertinent! Create and maintain multiple avenues of communication for the convenience of your students and parents. Remember, the countless hours of effort and preparation for what you do in the classroom is best expressed through those who experience it first and second hand. Encourage students and parents to email you through your school or other specified email address. Create a class website that is email accessible, has homework and project assignments uploaded, and update it regularly. Respond to your email promptly by checking your email account at least twice on weekdays and at least once on weekends. Advertise through word-of-mouth, parent letters, class website, and classroom posting, your email address, class website URL, and the dates and times when you are available before or after school for tutoring or parent conferences.
3) Show empathy with parents and maintain professionalism. Every teacher receives a few emails, voice mails, or parent conferences a year where the parent(s) is obviously displeased about the status of their child’s grades or social interaction due to the account that their child described to them with vigor and passion. Remember to put yourself in their shoes. Their feelings rarely stem from just the incident at hand. As human beings, our boiling point is often fed through a variety of factors that is brought to its pinnacle by the last factor. As a professional, you should avoid using vulgarities in response to the parents’ and/or child’s vulgar language. Should a parent become extremely irate or indicate intimidation tactics, you should only agree to have or continue to have a face-to-face conference in the presence of an administrator.
4) When approaching a parent-teacher conference via phone or face-to-face, you should be conscious of a few things as a professional. First listen intently, without interrupting, and maintain open body language. While listening, identify the main issues that you need to address. Once you have calmly addressed the main issues with a sense of empathy, offered a hand of “good will” such as outlining a plan of communication between you and the parent to monitor the situation as needed. Ultimately, parents want to feel like they are heard, understood, respected, and that their child has a quality learning experience with reasonable opportunities for optimum performance.
5) Be organized! Teachers have hectic schedules throughout the school year, however, you should make the time and effort to create a practical organization system that is easy to maintain. When others enter your classroom and take a look at your desk, they should not feel a sudden urge to pop an aspirin and lay down on a couch. Having a messy teacher’s desk and work area also tend to create a domino effect of students, parents, colleagues, and administrators questioning your ability to recall information, retrieve documents, or executing basic teacher accountability tasks.
6) Identify your strengths, interests, and focus on developing them through professional development workshops. Resist the professional trap of attending and being involved in everything that is offered. Remember, a jack-of-all-trades-but-master-of-none approach may eventually work against you. A teacher that is considered the faculty’s expert in one or two areas may appear more indispensable than a teacher who is has a little knowledge about a plethora of things. Once you feel you have exhausted your development in one or two areas, slowly begin to expand your knowledge in another area or two. For example, if you are a science teacher and your strength is biology, seek to collaborate with other biology teachers to create innovative biology-based lesson plans and present this at a departmental meeting. Take your favorite unit(s) and expand it/them to create assemblies with famous guest speakers or offer academically intense long-distance field trips that are offered to other science students. Attend science teacher workshops and local, regional, and national science conferences whenever possible.
7) Learn to say “no” when you are asked or volunteered to become involved in a variety of activities, committees, and projects. Keep focused on your responsibility to consistently provide a quality learning experience in your classroom and of your professional goals. Limit your participation in activities, projects, and others’ agenda that are not mandatory and may compromise your priorities. When others begin their pitch take a deep breath, listen, and take the time to think about it before committing yourself. In the long run, you will be appreciated for your quality of instruction and dedication to your students much more than your last-minute agreement to chaperone the soccer team road trip that will return to the school grounds at midnight on a Tuesday.
9) Join a few professional organizations and be an active member! Once you have identified your professional interests and goals, find the organizations that will provide you with resources, support, and opportunities to prepare for professional advancement. For example, if you are an English teacher who is interested in advocating for teachers and an eventual advancement to administration, you may consider joining organizations such as the National Association for Teachers of English (NATE), the local, state, and national teacher’s union, and the American Association of School Administrators (AASA). Remember to keep your main priorities in focus and only join the number of organizations that you can maintain an active status. You want to be more than a card holder. You want to have name recognition within the organization.
10) Surround yourself with colleagues who are sincere, positive, and proactive in their career as a teacher. Form an alliance that is supportive and informative of professional development and opportunities. Shy away from colleagues who are uninterested in improving their instructional strategies or who view faculty meetings and professional development workshops as prime opportunities to “tweet” or update their Facebook status.
11) Have you completed intense professional development workshops and received graduate credit or certification of some kind? Display your certificates! Inexpensive sign holders or picture frames can display to your students and their parents alike that you have gone above and beyond the basic requirements for teacher certification to provide a quality learning experience in the classroom. Equate the effects of your displayed certificates to that of entering your family doctor’s office and seeing his or her certificates displayed on the wall.
12) At the end of each school year it is important to critique your performance. Did you accomplish your professional goals? Did you establish and maintain the optimum learning environment in your classroom? How could you improve your instructional and professional strategies for next year?
13) Seek to be consistent and fair in classroom management. Gone are the days when students enter your classroom with respect for you simply because you are the adult assigned as their teacher. Therefore the first few weeks of school are critical for establishing yourself as an impartial, firm, but fair teacher in the eyes of your students and their parents. Failure to attend to this aspect of your job can result in a slippery slope of classroom management disaster! Once you have established yourself as a consistently fair teacher, you must consciously work to maintain this image under times of extreme pressure and stress throughout the school year. This is important for high school teachers, especially, since high school students have a tendency to have long-lasting memories for teachers who they deem as unfair, partial, or inconsistent.
In summary, quality still trumps quantity. It is not how many activities with which you are involved, it is the quality of your service to the few areas that you seek to master. Do your job…and do it well. The great news is that many teachers already implement these tips daily and are regarded in high esteem within their classroom, their faculty, and abroad!
~ LaNora M. James, Ed.D.
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