Practice: Teaching materials

Practice: Teaching materials

Teaching materials in one of the main tools of the teacher. Using only your teaching skills is not always enough no matter how good teacher you are. Moreover, the younger the students are teaching materials are more needed, which comes from children development.

Most common materials

On my practice I mainly see worksheets when it comes to the teaching materials. It happen few times that the math teacher showed me her collection of files. There were plenty of PDF files with ready math tasks. She presented them as a core of her teaching method. Before the lesson she goes to the copy machine and prepare as many sheet as needed for her students. She print them in color usually, which makes them more interesting for the students.

Unfortunately, I observed that students are no longer interested in any worksheet itself. If there's a map or other picture captures their attention they may look closely, but basically the main topic isn't something they focus on. I'd say it's very difficult to make the lesson engaging only using worksheets. This is probably the easiest way of teaching for the teacher, just like using only course book. What the teacher need to do is to present the task and check it afterwards. There's no creativity. I don't want to say that all course books and worksheets are useless and boring, but in my opinion they can't be the only teaching material used by the teacher through the school year.

New technologies

I guess you can agree that teachers should move with the times, no matter what subject do they teach. Teaching is not only about giving or presenting the knowledge. It needs to be done in a way which opes students' views and enables them to flourish in general. In my opinions, new technologies are main materials teacher should use these days.

I'd like to present the example of the history teacher from my practice school. She links her subject and using new technologies in a way I want to follow. As history comes with pictures and schemes Power Point presentations and Internet browser are perfect tools for her. She's got presentation on every topic from the curriculum. They are advanced but it's not a problem. For 5th and 6th grade she simply skips some slides she find not useful for her students' age and level of advance.

There's more. She uses video clips. I don't know from where does she take the clips but they are very good quality. They're interesting, colorful, sometimes funny. The students highly enjoy them. This is great opportunity to take a break from usual lesson, for the students and the teacher as well.

What about other materials?

By now I can't think of other materials the teachers used during the lesson. It worries me a little, as there are no games, group work or other activities. But there is possibility that I simply wasn't lucky to see them using something different. Next time talking to my mentor teacher I'm going to ask her how does it look like during the year. My question to you as a reader would be: what other materials than I mentioned in this post have you seen teachers using?