Effective Teaching Practices I can Work On

There are plenty of Effective Teaching Practices I can work on but here are just a few I want to work on. The one I want to work on the most is specifying and reinforcing productive student behavior. The class I am in this semester has been a little bit chatty. A lot of the students also don't seem to want to do their work which can sometimes be expected in school. The hard part for me will be to find a way to get them to be productive. There are multiple ways I could do that. I just need to find the way that works. Some students respond well to fear of getting in trouble (I know I did). As far as I can tell this will not work on the students I am working with. At this point I need to find a new way to motivate. I am hoping that if I show them respect in the classroom, they will respect me enough to listen to me and do what I ask.

The other practice I want to work on is checking student understanding during and after the lesson. One of the easy ways to check understanding is by simply asking the students if they understand. When you ask the whole class usually only the kids who understand say something and sometimes the teacher assumes that means the whole class understands. I want to be able to teach a lesson and then be able to talk to each student individually so they can ask me questions if they feel embarrassed. That is obviously what a perfect world looks like but I can adjust to use techniques that are variations of that.

These are just a few of the practices. As a young teacher I need to work on all of them but these two were the two I felt I could work on effectively in my class this semester.