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The following comments and recommendations will help parent educators to improve their effectiveness in the teaching process. The primary purpose for most of these observations or suggestions is to help teachers identify how their routine instructional methods can be improved.

1. The best teachers are those that have students who are daily growing more and more capable of pursuing their studies independently, and whose pupils exhibit an irresistible desire to know more.
   
2. Make good use of the power of praise when a student excels, but do so sparingly or such recognition will lose some of its effect.
   
3. While it is a reasonable goal to make school studies as pleasant as possible, there comes a time when students must be trained to face drudgery as a duty.
   
4. With beginners, in every area of study, the first processes must be learned slowly and very thoroughly by steady and patient instruction. The key point is, not merely how much pupils learn, but how well they learn it. If you expect to have lessons learned well, then make them as short as possible.
   
5. Use your eyes as a teacher. Look your students in the eye when you question them, and make them look you in the eye when they answer. Do not settle for anything less than the full attention of all of the children you are teaching. A lesson that was never received might just as well have never been given.
   
6. Lighten up your facial appearance and demeanor when teaching. The teacher who cannot occasionally join in a hearty laugh with their pupils lacks one key element of power.
   
7. Seldom repeat a question to students, unless they are very young. Train your students to pay close attention to the questions you ask the first time you speak.
   
8. Give your slower students time to think and speak after you have asked them a question. Children become easily discouraged if they are rushed to blurt out answers before their young minds are ready.
   
9. Explain a concept or direction when necessary, but make your students contribute when and where they are able. Instructors should employ long lectures on rare occasions only. Teachers should spend most of their time asking intelligent questions and encouraging meaningful student response. The best instructors do not talk when it is the student’s business to work; therefore the skilled teacher is neither talkative nor overly reserved. The very worst teachers are those who admire their own talk.
   
10. Use of a blackboard or mobile whiteboard by both student and teacher is wise for it stimulates students on both a visual and hands-on level.
    
11. The teacher’s primary duty is to make students think, not to think for them; to make them talk, not to talk for them; to draw out their God –given gifts or abilities, not to display their own.
    
12. Point out to your pupils, in advance, the main facts of a lesson, so that they may not waste their time on unimportant details. Continue this type of instruction until your students learn how to discriminate for themselves between chaff and wheat.
    
13. Never attempt to teach what you do not understand. Never tell a child what you can make that child tell you. Never give a piece of information to a student without asking him to repeat it. Never use a complex word when a simple word will work satisfactorily. Never burden your student with a rule that you do not have the will to consistently enforce. Never give an unnecessary command.
    
14. For most children, one hour’s study in the morning is worth two in the evening. Try to present complex subject matter early in the day when your students are fresh.
    
15. Do not confine yourself to questions that are printed in the student text or teacher’s manual. In addition, do not require your children to give their answers exactly as stated in the textbook, except in the case of vital rules or definitions.

The advice to teachers listed above, came largely from the pen of a well respected nineteenth century educator and author by the name of John Swett. Much of this material was also expanded and edited by Michael J. McHugh, in order that this information would be more useful to educators in the twenty-first century.

Copyright 2006 Michael J. McHugh

"Word from Scotland" from Sandy Shaw

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