5 Professional Teacher Development Skills
I’m quite certain that you’re in search of impressive professional development skills to learn as a teacher. As a teacher, swamped with so many tasks and activities accompanied by deadlines, it could become difficult to stand out; but standing out can only be achieved if you go the extra mile.
Check out some of the teacher development skills listed below, we believe that one of them is the spice you need in your career.
1. Leadership:
You don’t have to be born into royalty to be able to lead; neither do you have to have innate leadership abilities or gifts. You can equip yourself with the necessary skills it takes to be a leader. Take a course online, practice lessons learned, and most importantly, learn from your mistakes, if any, along the course of the training.
A teacher who has leadership skills can help in directing the affairs of the school. In the absence of the headteacher/principal, he/she may very well be the head teacher someday.
2. Time management:
Spending lots of hours trying to do the routine activities like grading, lesson planning, classroom organisation can be quite demoralizing. Especially when you have a million and one things to do. Learning time management or improving your time management skills would help you stay organized while meeting up with deadlines.
You would certainly learn how to multitask and make plans by allocating definite times to each activity you hope to achieve within the day, week, month, or year.
Suggested read: Essential Time Management Tips for Teachers
3. Project management:
This is the most noteworthy of all skills. Many people feel that this skill is mainly administrative, but that is not the case. Project management skills enable you to manage whatever project you have been put in charge of, from idea to research, to implementation, to the successful execution.
The school drama club or that fundraiser organized by the school would do well with a touch of project management. On the plus side, you could have a contract job based on that and can get a job if you suddenly decide to stop being a teacher.
Whatever you do, ensure that this is one of the skills you have under your belt, with a certification to prove it too. We suggest these Project Management certificate courses on Alison for anyone looking to get started with the basics of project management.
4. Decision making:
This is something we find ourselves doing every day, and although we might like to think that going through training or acquiring a skill set that enables you to make better and well-informed decisions might be a waste of time, we would like to disagree.
Perhaps what you need to do is, weigh the current rate of success you have with all the decisions you have made this month. How many decisions have you felt was out of place and how many have caused you to question your I.Q as a result of the outcome?
It doesn’t mean that as soon as you hone this skill, all decisions made would work completely in your favor. What this means is that even when it doesn’t work out, you would be able to identify what went wrong with the plan you have made, and how best to avoid the same mistake.
5. People management:
For a teacher, this is one skill set you have to acquire. Being a teacher doesn’t automatically mean that you have people skills. Relating or managing others can be quite daunting, especially if you don’t know what to do.
As a teacher, you are constantly interacting with many teachers like yourself, parents, students, and other individuals that you would encounter on the job. Each person with their different personalities. Being able to manage these individuals without losing your cool in situations where you were expected to go berserk is an advantage for you. Hence, the importance of this skill can not be over emphasized.
This skill enables you to understand individuals and how best to relate with them in any situation.
So What are your setbacks? Start acquiring these skills now! We recommend using online learning platforms like Alison, Coursera or Udemy to pick up some of these skills and more at your own pace.
