How to Make School Better

Happy employees make happy customers .All around the World studies show very clearly that when employees like their jobs, customers get better service and more satisfied. As in a language school students are our customers we have to make them happy and I firmly believe that the road leads to happiness goes directly through the teachers in a language school.
Firstly it is very well known that despite the latest technological advancements still the most important element of language learning is the teacher. Students of all ages need the intensive care and attention of a teacher throughout the learning process. Therefore, it is important for them to have a teacher who can focus on their needs with a fresh mind and be supportive and encouraging. For example, if the teacher thinks that he does not get what he deserves financially he might tend to think that his service must be limited or he can lose his attention while thinking of the bills he needs to pay. Teachers’ actions and behaviors are tied to their beliefs,perceptions, assumptions, and motivation levels. Research conducted over the past years has found that teachers’ self-efficacy affects student achievement and motivation, teachers’ adoption of innovation, commitment to teaching, teachers’ classroom management and control strategies, and teachers’ personal characteristics such as gender, grade level taught and experience. High efficacious teachers persist with low achieving students, make better use of time, criticize students’ incorrect answers less, and are more effective in guiding students to correct answers through their questioning. Low efficacy teachers, on the other hand, spend more time in nonacademic activities and make use of less effective techniques to guide students to correct responses.Teachers who are more confident in their abilities to affect student achievement through teaching, and who assume personal responsibility for influencing student achievement, tend to have a higher commitment to teaching.
Research in teachers’ perceived efficacy has examined teacher efficacy in relation to teachers’ willingness to introduce innovation in their teaching practice. Guskey’s (1988) study found that teachers with greater personal efficacy had also positive attitudes towards teaching (teaching affect) and had a fairly high level of confidence in their teaching abilities (teaching self-concept). In other words, those who liked teaching and felt confident about their abilities were highly effective in the classroom and seemed to be the most receptive to implement new practices. Conversely, those assumed to be less effective appeared to be the least receptive to innovation.

Secondly, most students do not care what their teacher’s resume says. The technical side is less important to them than who their teacher is as a human being. Because with a teacher they share not only knowledge but also their deepest secrets, future dreams and all kinds of life expactations. If we want a teacher to say “ I have the power to make my students’ day ”, we have to have the teacher say “I am happy in my job.” Take a teacher who is never appreciated for example, can we really expect him to appreciate the students ? experienced teachers’ beliefs of efficacy tend to be ‘‘stable’’ and hard to change once they have been established. Experienced teachers develop perceptions of their capabilities over time. those teachers with a great sense of PTE (beliefs in their abilities to reach students)and GTE(beliefs that all students can be taught) tend to be humanistic rather than custodial. In other words, the more efficacious the teacher, the less custodial to control students and the more likely he or she seemed to support student autonomy and responsibility.
In another study Woolfolk and Hoy (1990) examined prospective teachers’ sense of efficacy, pupil control ideology, motivational orientation, and bureaucratic orientation. They found that teachers with high efficacy were more humanistic in their pupil control than teachers with low efficacy, who tended to be custodial, i.e., more authoritarian and dogmatic. In other words, teachers with a custodial orientation were more rigid and highly controlled students while teachers with a humanistic orientation tended to emphasize cooperation,interaction,and experience as well as student autonomy.