Efficacy

Self-awareness, confidence, persistence, work ethic, and belief in one's ability is definitely connected to becoming a highly effective teacher. Self-awareness makes you go about your day in a very conscientious way. This is good because teachers are always held to a higher standard, and are always being watch from one angle or another. Being aware of what you do and say really does affect how you influence your students and peers. Confidence must be shown at all times when in the classroom. Many students, in the older classrooms, love to find any weakness a teacher may show to disrupt the class for their enjoyment. If a teacher stays strong and is in charge of his or her class daily the confidence will not be questioned or tested. Persistence is key to teaching. What would a teacher be without it? Without persistence a teacher would just give up helping a struggling student, or quit trying new and effective things in the classroom. What also is a part of being persistent is one's work ethic. One must have a schedule and keep pushing themselves to new and better things for the class. If you do not hold yourself to a higher standard how can you ask others to do the same? All of these things previously stated are important but none of these things will work out if you do not believe in your ability to teach.

Inventiveness

Is creativity an important skill for the 21st century? I feel that we should encourage our students and children to think outside the box every single day! As the years go on they will have to deal with much more than we ever had to, and this will require many different types of thinking and many more new and fresh ideas. Many forget to encourage creativity. We should always encourage it, teach it, and reward it. Ways to bring about creativity in a classroom setting is just to have many different activities or many different ways of going about a certain thing. You can also challenge the students to come up with even more ideas for that certain topic to expand even more.

Reflectiveness

It has been said that many teachers and students when asked to, find it hard to reflect upon many things. After doing a whole reflective paper on our own learning experiences through the years, even though the previous statement seems bizarre, I would have to agree. When looking back to the early years in school for many, they may remember the people, school plays, school parties, but when asked to think about previous teachers teaching styles many are stumped. When I reflect upon elementary school years, I just remember many creative activities that were done during class time. Then moving into middle school, I for the most part remember classes that interested me and many extra curricular activities I participated in to find my calling. It really was not until high school that I remember specific teaching styles. For example, the "laid back" teacher that showed many movies, power-points, and had more busy work than anything else or the "strict" teacher that gave long meaningful projects where students really had no choice but to understand the material. Some find that reflection is the heart of the teaching process. This is true, because teachers have to try out many things within their classroom to find what works for the students and what they connect to the best. Once one style of teaching or one assignment is given, the teacher must then go over everything and reflect upon the students performance and think about changes that could be made to help. Reflecting can be done almost anywhere I believe. For most effective reflecting, I feel that when what is being reflected upon is fresh in your head and you have an open mind to critique things that is the best time.