Teacher Experience Characteristics

The Effect of Teacher Experience Characteristics on Teaching Effectiveness

The benefits of teaching experience will be best realized when teachers are carefully selected and well prepared at the point of entry into the teaching workforce, as well as intensively mentored and rigorously evaluated prior to receiving tenure. These efforts will ensure that those who enter the professional tier of teaching have met a competency standard from which they can continue to expand their expertise throughout their careers. Teaching experience is positively associated with student achievement gains throughout a teacher’s career. Gains in teacher effectiveness associated with experience are most steep in teachers’ initial years, but continue to be significant

It provides opportunities for teachers and students to operate, store, manipulate, and retrieve information, encourage independent and active learning, and self-responsibility for learning such as distance learning, motivate teachers and students to continue using learning outside school hours, plan and prepare lessons and design materials such as course content delivery and facilitate sharing of resources, expertise and advice. This multipurpose instrument has the capability not only of engaging students in instructional activities to increase their learning, but of helping them to solve complex problems to enhance their cognitive skills. ICT plays a pivotal role in transforming the conventional work environment in schools. Teachers are beginning to avail themselves of opportunities in networked professional learning communities to share resources and expertise, discuss pedagogical approaches, reflect on practice and provide support for their colleagues as part of the community experience. Using networked communities of inquiry as an integral component, teachers can work in a collaborative, mutual space to question and investigate ideas and engage in pedagogical conversation around their own work and practice. Within networked classrooms, where teachers and students alike have access to computers and the Internet, the classroom is no longer an isolated workplace (Clifford et al., 2004). The

Being an effective teacher means to reach every student that comes into your classroom. An effective teacher has the student's best interest in mind at all times. They know the content that they are teaching as well as a variety of ways in which they may teach it. They know their students well and can judge which method of teaching is most effective for each student. An effective teacher also is flexible and able to adapt to changes. It is a person that relates personally with the students and is respected and behaves professionally. Today’s teachers are called upon to work with colleagues to design learning environments that promote deeper engagement in learning as a reciprocal process. Learning can no longer be understood as a one-way exchange where “we teach, they learn.” It is a process that requires teachers to help students learn with understanding, and not simply acquire disconnected sets of facts and skills. Effective teaching practices also recognize how important strong relationships are in educating students, building social cohesion, and producing minds that thirst for knowledge for a lifetime. They, along with administrators and other important adults, make school a socially, academically, and intellectually exciting and worthwhile place to be. Teaching effectiveness is more than just the successful transmission of