Whether you are doing it as a career on its own or you are simply looking for a different way to fund your travels, there is no doubt that teaching online is an excellent option. With so many kids and adults that have the desire and capacity to learn, if you are going to take on this path for yourself, you certainly want to be as good a teacher as you possibly can be. There are all sorts of different ways of achieving this particular feat and all sorts of styles of teacher that you can be, but let’s look into a few general pointers that can give you a massive helping hand in this regard.
Plan out your lessons better
Being a good teacher starts off with the lessons that you are planning out in the first place. Essentially, you need to feel confident in the material and the knowledge that you are imparting. This means that you need to fully understand and appreciate the different concepts in the first place, and you certainly don’t want to get into a situation in which you are just as confused as your pupils are. You should also plan out a range of different activities throughout the lesson, and try to vary these up as much as possible. After all, you don’t want to get into a situation in which you are boring your students with the same thing time and time again.
Take your time
One of the other issues that many online teachers find themselves up against is that they try to rush through the concepts and don’t really take the time to ensure that they have all been properly understood by their students. One of the best ways to combat this is to teach online classes at your own pace. You should also take numerous breaks throughout the course of the lesson to check understanding. This gives you the opportunity to either slow down or speed up as necessary. You are likely to need to adapt this from pupil to pupil. While it is a good idea to take your time for some students, if you happen to do this too often, you can get into a situation in which you are boring others.
Ask for feedback
One of the only ways that anyone has a hope of improving at anything is if they take their time and ensure that they are not rushing through anything at all. At the same time, you also need to ask for feedback from your students to find out how you are doing as a teacher. In this way, it is bound to be much more likely that you are able to improve what you are doing. You should try to get feedback that is as specific as it possibly can be. You also don’t want it to be too sugarcoated. After all, you need to make sure that you are getting as honest an impression as possible. Otherwise, you will simply be hearing what you want to and you will not be able to improve what you are doing in any way at all.
Set up your working environment carefully
If you are lucky enough to have a home office that you are teaching from, it is bound to be much easier to be confident in setting it up properly as you would like it to be. However, if you are constantly on the move, you need to make sure that you are confident in the space that you are using and that it is suitable for all your needs. This means that you should ideally have a closing door and a quiet space away from any distractions. Ultimately, this all depends on what sort of teacher you are. However, you need to keep your students in mind at all times. After all, they are the ones paying you for your services and you do not want to get into a situation in which there are complaints that lead to them stopping using your services altogether.
Practice and learn from your mistakes
Being a better online teacher takes plenty of practice and there are bound to be more than a fair share of mistakes made along the way. Rather than resisting this, you should aim to lean into it and learn from any errors so that they do not happen again at any point in the future.
All of these are amongst the ways that you can be a better online teacher.
