1. Be certified: posses the degrees necessary to be considered eligible for teaching
2. Be capable: certificates alone are not enough if you fail to acquire the art of teaching
3. Be creative: being capable is necessary, but being creative is quintessential. Learn to create a new you every day in order to ensure that the students fail to remain inattentive and understand with interest and intention, what you desire to deliver. Design teaching aids, acquire a few and motivate students to come up with innovative and comfortable ways in which they can understand a concept. These actions will help you to establish yourself as an edupreneur!
4. Be collaborative: when you work in a school/ college, you work in and with a team. An edu team is a set of different people who have skills and multiple ideas but work with a unified set of actions aimed at achieving the organizational goal of providing quality and innovative education. While you may be an expert in your subject, you might be falling short of the skill required to control the class or design a teaching aid. In order to ensure order, discipline and unity, collaboration or cooperation with the team leaders and within the team is quintessential. Work as a team, work as one. This helps.
5. Be confident: be assertive with your skills, words, walk and ideas. Assertiveness is a sign of confidence or the other name for confidence. While it helps you to clear your stand, it also injects a dose of confidence in students and colleagues. Remember this: confidence is contagious.
6. Be a Communicator: Learn to speak and present things clearly. Words and actions communicate intention and a biased/veiled communication helps none. In order to ensure effectiveness and efficiency and leave an indelible mark as a communicator par excellence, learn to sharpen communication skills. Avoid grape wine talks to avoid miscommunication and character assassination.
7. Be Constant: your approach towards teaching must not be influenced by anyone and anything other than the developments in your subject area. Make efforts to understand a student inside out and help him/her develop as a human being. Make consistent efforts to help the students understand the subject with ease. Make continuous efforts to upgrade yourself as an educator par excellence. Be an inspiration. Always.
8. Continuous development: as a teacher acquiring degrees is not enough. One has to ensure that he/she does continuous research and development in/on his subject. This is as necessary as upgrading a cell phone to keep it effectively functional. The moment you stop upgrading your skills, your content, your methods, your approach, your career becomes stagnant where demand will be less in proportion to your expectations and experience. Reading newspapers, maintaining a learning diary, attending workshops/seminars/webinars, enroll for online courses, using free content on and from social media platforms to develop speaking skills, writing skills etc.are a few instances of what continuous development means.
9. Critical thinking: Develop your high order thinking skills (H.O.T.S) to ensure that you match the expectations of the students and simultaneously develop the same skill in them.
10. Computer literate: basic computer skills like typing and using MS OFFICE, reverting by e-mail are skills which are necessary. Stop assuming that these skills are for students and office goers and not for teachers. AI getting introduced into school syllabus is an indication that teachers must get ready to use it or be replaced. Use of technology during CoVID has to a greater extent made teachers IT enabled but there are miles to go before computer literacy becomes a non negotiable term of employment for any teacher.
