GOOD HISTORY TEACHER

What Makes A Good History Teacher?

What Makes A Good History Teacher?

What Makes a Teacher Good?

The process of becoming a teacher is dialogic in that teaching is about negotiating the multiple identities that people possess within the system of college or university (Yero, 2002). These multiple identities are complex and shape who people are as educators and individuals; they shape beliefs about students and the teaching and learning process. Beliefs are the representations of reality and experience that guide one's thoughts and behaviours; they are the judgments or evaluations people make of their world, others, and themselves. They are also the best indicators of decisions that individuals make throughout their lives.

Practice

An important component of teaching subject of history is the development of the pre-service teacher's ability to reflect critically on teaching practice and experiences in the history class (Britzman, 2003). Journal writing and the reflective teaching log are common means of promoting reflection during the student teaching experience. Journal writing helps student teachers begin the process of critiquing and guiding their own professional practice.

Self-believe

A considerable body of research demonstrates that teachers' beliefs have a strong impact on the treatment of students and the instructional decisions that teachers make about teaching and learning. In that event, teachers' practice will be improved if they have an opportunity to engage in reflection about their beliefs. In particular, if teacher education programmes incorporate reflection as part of their curriculum, prospective teachers will have practice with reflecting and understanding how beliefs affect student learning. When teachers have opportunities to critically reflect and discuss how their experiences have shaped beliefs that may differ from others, they can better understand and counter practices that reproduce inequity and margin-alisation. This entry examines how beliefs influence teachers, how this can lead to inequities, and what measures could ameliorate this impact.

How Beliefs Operate

A review of educational research suggests that the individual teacher's beliefs, attitudes, and perspectives about his or her work guide pedagogy, instructional planning, and history class practice. Moreover, beliefs also play an important role in the decisions that teachers make about students in general because they guide how the learner is perceived. Beliefs become the lens through which teachers interpret behaviour. As a result, if a teacher believes that a student cannot achieve, then the behaviour of the student will be interpreted or perceived through that lens, even when the student behaves in ways contrary to the belief. Similarly, if a teacher believes that a programme works, even when it fails, the teacher will attend to the aspects of the programme that preserve the belief in the history programme.

Teachers' beliefs operate independently from the cognition associated with developing knowledge and skills. Frank Pajares emphasised the importance of understanding the four characteristic features of teachers' beliefs: (1) existential presumptions, (2) affective and evaluative aspects, (3) alternativity, and (4) episodic nature. Existential presumptions address the origin of one's beliefs and how these are the reflection of individuals' presumptions about certain truths that they deem applicable to ...