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From my own experiences working with children and watching other people teach, I’ve noticed that good educators share many common attributes. (Aside: when I say “educators”, I really mean parents, schoolteachers, and indeed anyone who needs to impart knowledge to another person.)

What’s interesting is that almost anyone can acquire these attributes if they put their mind to it — teaching doesn’t really require any “special skills” that are beyond the reach of the average person. Of course, if you want to teach a subject at the highest levels, it helps if you’re a specialist in the area, but in general a simple willingness to learn on the teacher’s part is surprisingly effective.

Anyway, here are ten things — not in any particular order — that I think all good educators ought to aim for:

1. KNOW THE CHILD: You can only teach well if you have a good understanding of the person you’re teaching. At the very least, you should know about the child’s interests and his personality traits. Try to relate to and empathise with the child as best you can.

   Of course, a lot of this knowledge can and will be obtained while you’re teaching. Once you have a good understanding of the child, you can adjust your teaching style to “perfectly match” the child’s style of learning.

2. GOOD COMMUNICATION: You should know how to communicate with the child “at the right level” so he can understand you easily. Try to sound like you’re interested in and excited by whatever you’re teaching, and don’t speak in a monotone!

   Effective communication is two-way: encourage the child to express his own thoughts and ideas, and try to adjust/improve your teaching based on the feedback he gives you. Don’t forget the importance of nonverbal communication — it’s usually easy to tell from a child’s body language whether or not he’s interested in what you’re teaching him.

3. MUTUAL RESPECT: It’s impossible to teach someone who doesn’t take you seriously! You should try to earn the respect of the child, while at the same time being considerate of his needs and wants. Aim to strike a good rapport with the person you’re teaching.
4. PATIENCE: At times, teaching can feel like an immensely frustrating experience, and there will often be occasions when the child doesn’t seem to be learning anything or is even moving backwards.

   This is where patience comes in handy; you just have to keep trying until things start moving in the right direction again. However, this doesn’t mean you should persist with a style of teaching that clearly isn’t working; it’s important to be flexible!

5. A SENSE OF FUN: Lots of people think that learning has to be a chore and a bore, but children tend to learn (and retain what they have learnt) much better if they actually enjoy what they are doing. With a bit of imagination, it’s possible to make even the most mundane learning tasks seem interesting to a child.

   As children grow older, they gradually start to understand the importance of their studies more, and so you don’t have to put quite as much effort into making their work fun for them. Still, it’s always good to have a sense of humour when teaching older children, and you should try to make things interesting whenever possible, especially if it seems like the person you’re teaching is growing bored.

6. ENJOY LEARNING YOURSELF: There’s nothing worse than a teacher teaching a subject that he doesn’t actually like. More generally, we can’t expect children to enjoy learning if we ourselves have no interest in learning!

   If you do enjoy learning, you can set a good example for the child by, for example, showing him that you’re curious about the world, always trying to learn new things, figuring out how to solve interesting problems, and so on. Most importantly, try to make it clear that learning is a way of life, and doesn’t begin and end in the classroom.

7. JUST DO IT: It’s fairly commonplace for people to think that they are incapable of teaching, or that the child is incapable of learning a subject. Frankly, this is a terrible attitude to have! Avoid making assumptions about what you can and can’t teach, or what the child can and can’t learn.

   Instead, just tell yourself “Okay, this is what I’d like to teach, and now let’s see if I can find a way to help the kid learn this stuff.” It might take time, but you probably will find a way eventually, and you certainly have a better chance than if you don’t even try to teach him!

8. BE RESOURCEFUL: Teaching is a whole lot easier when you don’t have to come up with everything yourself. Knowing how to extract useful information from books, the Internet, and other knowledgeable people is an incredibly useful skill to have, and if you look in the right places it doesn’t even have to cost much money.

   Try to be on the lookout for things that might help you with your teaching; for instance, you could put common household items to good use, or try to learn from another teacher if you see him using a teaching technique that seems like it might be handy.

9. KNOW THE SUBJECT: Obviously, it helps if you have a good understanding of the subject you want to teach, but you can still do a reasonable job even if you’re not an expert. You just have to be willing to learn a few new things yourself.

   There are two ways you can do this: you can either spend a bit of your own time learning about the subject, or you can learn with the child. I prefer the latter, and not just because it takes less time! Learning with the child lets him see the process of learning (which is often messy and unrefined) as well as the end result, and it’s usually more interesting for a child to learn collaboratively with another person instead of just being told what to do.

10. FLEXIBILITY: Sticking rigidly to a single method of teaching is usually a bad idea. Be flexible in the way that you teach; every child learns in a different way, and their learning habits also evolve over time. What works with one child won’t necessarily work with another, and you should be willing to change the way you teach if it isn’t working as well as you’d like.

    Personally, I like to have an array of techniques at my disposal, and I use different methods based on my knowledge of the child and what he’s learning. It’s also important to be open to new ways of teaching, because even if you’re already doing a very good job, you can always improve even further!

Answer: a lot.

In fact, there’s so much you can do that I couldn’t possibly cover the whole topic in a single blog post; instead, I’m going to talk today about just a few aspects of how you can benefit your child’s education. This article is aimed primarily at parents of kids who are already at school, especially those who have very little time on their hands.

Today I’ll mainly be talking about what you can do in the home environment to help your child do better at school. Your child’s home environment can contribute an enormous amount to his success in education, regardless of the actual quality of teaching at his school. As a teacher, I often encounter situations where a student vastly improves his results simply because his parents have become willing to reinforce or supplement the work he’s doing at school.

Spending time with your child

One of the best things you can do at home for your child is to have a Learning Time with him on a daily basis. The Learning Time is just an uninterrupted period with your child that is dedicated to supplementing and/or reinforcing the education he receives from school.

During this time, you can do anything from helping him organise his schedule to having an informal chat with him about what he’s done at school for the day. I’ll talk more about what you can do during the Learning Time in the next section.

Don’t worry if you think you are too busy to be able to spend much time with your kids, because the Learning Time need not take up much of your day. In fact, your child will benefit greatly even if you can only spare half an hour or fifteen minutes per day. Consistency is much more important than long hours, so a daily 20-minute Learning Time is preferable to a weekly 2-hour session.

What the Learning Time is all about

Before I talk about what you can do during the Learning Time, a quick word about preparation. Try to ensure that the learning environment is pleasant and relatively free of distractions. If lots of people are chatting noisily in the background or somebody is watching TV a short distance away, don’t be surprised if your child can’t concentrate!

As mentioned in the previous article, keep everything you do during the Learning Times relaxed and informal, so that your child associates his learning times with positive emotions. This is especially true if he is not used to discussing his schoolwork with you.

If you’re just starting out, all you need to do in the first few Learning Times is familiarise yourself with your child’s work and how he likes to do things. This is all part of getting to know your child. Here are a few obvious ways in which you can do this:

1. Ask him if you can look through his books/notes. This will give you the clearest idea of what topics he’s studying, the quality of his work, and his strong and weak points.
2. Have an informal chat about what he’s been doing at school. Many children prefer to answer more specific questions than “what have you been doing at school?”, in which case you should just ask him exactly what subjects he’s been studying. Ask him what he likes and dislikes about school, and what he would change if he could.
3. Some children prefer writing to talking; if your child is like this, then ask him to write about what he’s studying at school, his favourite and least-liked subjects, what he’d like to improve on, and so on.

Once you’ve familiarised yourself with what your child is doing at school, you can start thinking about how you can use the Learning Times to help him. Exactly what you do during the Learning Time will vary depending on how old your child is, what he’s studying, his interests, and how he likes to learn. I give some examples of things you can try below — notice that you can provide a lot of help to a child even if you don’t fully understand the subjects he’s studying.

1. Use the Learning Time to talk about your child’s homework. You can ask him if any homework needs to be handed in soon, and provide him with encouragement if necessary (but don’t do his homework for him!).
2. If he has little motivation for his studies, it’s up to you to be the motivator! Provide incentives, give him praise for each small effort, look for ways to make his studies fun, and so on. See the last article for more details on how to do this.
3. Help him improve his understanding of his work by asking him to explain some aspects of a topic he’s studying to you. Tell him that you don’t know much about the subject and would like to learn; many children enjoy being the “teacher” for a change!

   Initially, keep your questions simple to make things easy for him, and don’t worry if his explanations aren’t perfect. Try to guide him towards the right way of thinking (e.g. by asking good questions) instead of just telling him that he’s wrong.

4. Similarly to item 3, you could ask him to write an essay about any aspect of a subject he’s studying. In his essays, he could write about what he knows about a certain topic, what he likes or dislikes about it, why he thinks the subject is worth (or not worth!) studying, etc. Again, remember to keep things simple at first, especially if he’s not used to writing.



5. Study skills 1: Help your child organise his work. Exactly how you do this depends on your child’s preferences: for example, he could write summary sheets for each subject, structure his books/notes on each subject in a consistent manner, or learn how to make use of colour-coded folders, sticky notes, etc. You could also help him improve the presentation (i.e. the general layout) of his work; even good students often have problems presenting their work, and it can affect the way they think about problems.
6. Study skills 2: Suggest or help him gather resources to aid him in his studies. This can involve anything from acquiring information from books and the Internet to encouraging him to ask questions of his teachers and other people. Knowing how to make the most of one’s available resources is a skill many children lack, and hunting for useful materials can be a fun little excursion in its own right.
7. Study skills 3: Help your child plan his work. He could make a timetable showing what he plans to do in each day (and you can both see whether he actually followed the plan!); alternately, he could keep a “school journal” so he can keep track of work that needs to be done, write down important deadlines and key dates, identify his strong and weak points, and so on.
8. Study skills 4: If your child is revising for exams, you can discuss strategies and come up with a good revision plan. For instance, he should aim to cover all the relevant material well before the exam date, so that he has ample time to practice on past papers. You can also ask him to explain topics to you (this improves the depth of his understanding — see item 3) or try some quizzes (see item 10 below).



9. If he’s stuck on a question you don’t understand, there are several things you can try: ask him to show you what he has done to try to solve the problem, make sure he’s read through the question carefully, ask him to look through his books/notes for material relevant to the question, etc. This kind of guidance will often enable him to solve the problem himself. As a last resort, he can look to other resources to help him with his problem (see item 6).

   Alternately, you can try to learn more about the subject with him (which also sets a good example for him and shows him how you learn), or you can read about it in your own time so that you are better able to help him. I often do this!

10. Make a little quiz out of the contents of his books; ask him about definitions and terminology, methods, or whatever else is relevant. This is something you can try even if you don’t fully understand the material, because you can easily compare his answers with the information in his books. It’s also a good way of ensuring he has a comprehensive understanding of the material.
11. If your child is already a very good student, use the Learning Time to supplement his learning. Challenge him a little more by giving him harder problems and increasing the breadth or depth of his understanding. Look for resources (see item 6) and find things for him to work on independently.
12. Just have a chat with your child about something constructive, and not necessarily directly related to his schoolwork. For instance, you could talk about his plans for the future, or something casual such as what he would do if he had a million pounds and didn’t have to work. Constructive conversations like this are particularly handy when your child doesn’t feel like doing any work!

Don’t forget that when discussing your child’s schoolwork, it’s important not to make the mistake of thinking that grades are all that matter! The goal shouldn’t always be to get “the right answer”, but to improve your child’s thinking skills and the way he looks at learning and his schoolwork in general.

Finally, the atmosphere of your household also has a considerable effect on your child’s willingness to learn. If everyone else in the house — especially older siblings — spends a lot of time reading or doing constructive activities, it will be very natural for your child to behave similarly. The simplest thing you can do is to behave the way you would like your child to behave.

Seeing how effective this is. Videos could be fun for a bit of extra variety.