Burn the Teacher's Desk
As we end the school year here in New Zealand, the speeches from leaving staff are one of the traditions that schools have. Usually, such speeches are related to thanking the school or witty anecdotes of the past, but in my most recent experience, one teacher decided to provide insights on what he thought were the keys to making an effective teacher and one was simply to burn the teacher's desk. The traditional classroom usually has the teacher at his or her desk at the front, where content is taught from, instructions given, and more often than not emails are read and replied to. However, is this the most effective way to interact with our students? The key to good classrooms is the relationships in them. One of the easiest to develop these relationships is to simply walk around the classroom or even to sit in different locations within the classroom, which is something I often do. When a teacher mostly stays at the front of the classroom, students tend to become disinterested an