For Educators: Advice for Educators

Personal Advice

1. Your attitude is crucially important! Be positive and excited about leading a group session.
2. Do not talk down to your participants. They will resent it if you adopt a condescending attitude and belittle their abilities or backgrounds.
3. Be pleasant and friendly, but not chummy.
4. Keep your sense of humor. It is easier to share a joke that amuses the participants than try frown on hilarity. Try to plan for a laugh daily in each session.
5. A request made with a smile is more likely to be honored than a curt order. Find ways of suggesting good behavior without issuing orders.
6. Get plenty of sleep so that you can be alert and self-controlled during the day.
7. Remember, participants are entitled to a bad day just as much as the instructor is.
8. Neatness and good grooming indicate pride in one's self and in one's work, calling forth a favorable response from learners.
9. Set an example of good manners. Never sink to using sarcasm or ridicule.
10. Keep your voice low and pleasant. If you find your voice rising, stop and pitch it several tones lower. Use silence.

General Advice

1. A disorderly room invites disorderly behavior. Before each session, make sure the room is in order.
2. Plan lessons carefully, with varied activities and alternate procedures, since your participants' span of attention is probably short. On the other hand, don't crowd too many activities into one session. Be flexible and responsive to the group. What works in one group session may not work in another. What succeeds one day may fail the next.
3. Work out beforehand the system you want to use to distribute materials and worksheets and give definite instructors for distribution.
4. Stand at the door at the beginning of each session. This gives you a good opportunity to share general friendliness, greet participants who have not attended before and exchange casual remarks with others.
5. Avoid standing with your back to the group for any length of time. If you do, you may invite disorderly conduct. Learn to write on the board with only your right shoulder toward the board. Participants' attention tends to be focused on what you are writing if the words are not obscured by your body. Whenever possible, anything you need to put on the board should be written before group sessions.
6. Avoid emotionally charged topics at first. After a group has worked with an instructor for a while, members more readily accept any conversational subject that comes up.
7. Be definite and concise in directions. Be firm and be consistent in application of policies and rules. Vacillating between laxness and strictness is asking for trouble, but be reasonable and be fair.

Dealing with Specific Cases

In spite or your efforts, situations may arise which call for remedial action. If so, speak quietly and privately to the offender. If possible, handle the whole matter yourself. Calling in a supervisor lessens your prestige with the participants and makes the next occasion more difficult.