Mistakes Teachers Often Make

Teachers often -

• Fail to do effective long-range and daily planning.
• Fall into rut a by using the same teaching strategy or combination of strategies day after day.
• Spend too much time with one student or one group and not monitoring the entire class.
• Begin a new activity before gaining the students' attention.
• Talk too fast, and are sometimes shrill.
• Use a voice level that is always either too loud or too soft.
• Stand too long in one place (the feet of clay syndrome).
• Sit too long while teaching (the posterior of clay syndrome).
• Overemphasize the negative.
• Are way too serious and not much fun.
• Are way too much fun and not serious.
• Are ineffective when they use facial expressions and body language.
• Tend to talk to and interact with only half the class (usually their favorites, and usually on the right).
• Interrupt students while they are on task.
• Do not intervene quickly enough during inappropriate student behavior.
• Do not learn and use student names in an effective way (kids pick up quickly on this and respond in kind).
• Fail to do appropriate comprehension checks to see if students understand the content as it is taught.
• Use poorly worded, ambiguous questions.
• Introduce too many topics simultaneously (usually the result of poor planning).
• Overuse punishment for classroom misbehavior - going to an extreme when other consequences work better.