| I'm only going to provide a super short list of a few must-haves for learning to occur successfully. This list is mainly targeted towards new or prospective teachers and teachers who are new to virtual learning (veteran teachers, don't forget these essential components in the virtual world!). There are many more components needed, of course, but these are non-negotiable: |Respect |Organization |Flexibility |Feedback |  |
 | I'll tell you now - no good learning is going to happen if you cannot be respectful of those who you are responsible for teaching. How can respect be developed? Every person has a unique style, so there's not necessarily an exact path. However, one approach is for you, the educator, to be approachable. Listen to learn, not just to hear. Yes, you typically answer a million questions a day and make split-second decisions almost continuously. Yes, you are asked to make last-minute adjustments and make time for extra duties. Yet, one of the best tools at your disposal is to listen to what students have to tell you. It can provide great insight in how to approach them and it helps build positive relationships, which is essential. |
| Disorganization is a disservice to you, your colleagues, and your students. Not only are you going to get frustrated, but your efforts will be made much more treacherous without incorporating solid organizational skills. Keeping records and being able to quickly access those is an important role of the educator, whether in-person or in the online environment. Take the time to set up a system where you can easily track both hard and soft copies of files. Yes, you can adjust your organizational system as you see fit (see flexibility below) and you should. It's not going to be perfect the first try, but you have to start somewhere. |  |
 | If you are not generally a flexible person, then you better start stretching or find a different profession. Sure, you can try to not be flexible and stay in education, but it's going to be a bruised and miserable experience for you, your colleagues, and your students. What does flexibility look like? For one, being able to make changes to your lessons on-the-fly. Not every teacher gets it right the first time (sorry, 1st period/block students). You should want to improve, and those who can even flex from one class to the next, you get bonus points. There are other examples of flexibility, though. Consider last minute schedule changes, students arriving late or leaving early, and even having vastly diverse groups of students within one class. If you can learn to adapt to these scenarios, you will come out being a much more successful educator (and your colleagues and students will appreciate it). |
| Providing feedback and receiving feedback are both core essentials to the educator. Today, learning is becoming more about growth than always achieving fixed standards. That means that a student who scores a 50% isn't left behind for not getting 100%, but if they started at 0% knowledge, growth has occurred (0 to 50!). In the same manner, teachers should continually desire to get better and improve their knowledge and skill sets. The best way to see growth is to reflect, revise, and retry (both teachers and students should aspire for growth). The best way to reflect on what is and is not working? Feedback. | |
And that's the bottom line.
-Bullock
-Bullock
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