How to be Less Nervous when Teaching
You definitely need to read this if you are a teacher, or aspiring to be one, and anxious to find answers to questions like “how to be less nervous when teaching?” we have adequately guided you with 5 interesting tips on how you can get rid of nervousness in this article, read on to find out how:
Teaching is undoubtedly one of the greatest professions in the world, from time immemorial, its relevance and importance in shaping the youngsters of every generation subsequently cannot be less emphasized.
The teaching profession is the major reason there is the transfer of knowledge, its renewal and relevance everywhere in the world, the others are of course through, self-discovery, trial and error methods, and role modeling to mention a few.
However, there are some challenges that come alongside this profession, these include, frequent brainstorming and nervousness/fear to mention a few. In this post, we aimed to help provide every teacher with tips on how to be less nervous when teaching.
Table of Contents
What is Teaching?
According to my school of thought, teaching is an act of directly impacting, or verbally passing knowledge to people. It is done in a bid to make the recipients understand the concept of the existence of a phenomenon or process.
The recipients are made to exercise, practice, understand and assimilate the information disseminated by the teacher in the process of teaching before they can be seen as one who have been completely thought.
Related: The 6 Processes Involved in Learning
The Importance of Teachers in the Society:
As stated in the introductory stage of this article, teaching is a very powerful and important profession anywhere in the world, it serves as the grassroots for the procreation of knowledgeable young ones. Below this section are some highlighted reasons why teachers are important in our society.
- Teachers help with the spread of important and educative information across the world
- They provide our children as well as adults with guidelines on what type of career exactly fits their kind of person.
- Teachers are basically the powerhouse behind the relevance of pre-existing educative records and their advancement by the new generations in today’s world.
How to be Less Nervous when teaching:
We understand that you probably get on this article looking for answers about how to be less nervous when teaching.
You probably are afraid because it’s your first time standing in a crowd to teach, or you just could not get rid of fear when teaching, even after you’ve taken various teaching tasks in the past.
Whatever your reasons may be, below are some very interesting ways to put an end to your teaching woes.
1. Strategize and Master a Particular Teaching method and Approach for yourself
What do we mean by this? Here it is-
Our first tip on how to be less nervous when teaching is to master a good teaching method. The teaching profession is actually an art that can be planned and mastered off-stage before you step into the classroom to perform your daily duty.
It has been deduced from our vast experience in teaching, that 90% of teachers that encounters anxiety when teaching are mostly new recruits to the teaching profession.
The only possible reason we found out for this is that those who have been in the teaching job for long have mastered a particular method of teaching and they stick by the same approach every time they step into the classroom to teach.
This helps them to get rid of any anxiety and fear, they have gotten used to almost every unnecessary scene that comes with the profession and knows exactly how to successfully tackle them.
However, if you are a new recruit in the teaching space and would like to not encounter fear, set up a plan, and manner of approach you would like to use in the classroom and master them before you step out to teach.
2. Have Enough Knowledge About the Topic
No man is an island of knowledge, therefore, it’s completely okay if as a teacher you don’t know it all, but you need to be equipped to some extent.
You can make research about the topic to be thought about in the classroom, there could be new inventions and discoveries about them. You need to check for that to stay updated on the concerned topic. You would not want to be knocked off your feet by a curious and brilliant student.
However, only discuss what you know and always let your students know that you would provide answers to their unanswered questions in the next class, avoid rigidity and be flexible.
When you have enough arsenal of knowledge about the topic you are about to teach in the class, you might be rewarded with some confidence.
3. Work on your Mindset
Live in the present and do away with worrying about how much you wish to impress the onlookers. As a teacher, you should know that the primary objective of your profession is to impact some valuable knowledge into your students’ minds, therefore you do not have to make the situation about yourself.
As a teacher, when you resort to impressing the onlookers instead of carrying out the assignment at hand, you are most likely prone to over-task yourself. This is just as good as setting up oneself for failure unknowingly and you might only end up giving yourself some unnecessary adrenaline.
Just keep it simple, do not worry about what the onlookers might say, do not base your teaching duty on the bid to impress anyone, just have it in mind that you are out there to help your students understand the concept behind the subject topic at hand.
Having the mindset to impress your employers while teaching is okay, but it becomes a wrong thing to do when it is the reason you begin to sweat profusely and struggle with words while lecturing.
4. Stay Relaxed and Calmed
It is proven that one of the tools that help improve the deepening of confidence in every individual is excessive anxiety, hence the reason you need to know how to adequately deal with anxiety. To avoid being swept away by the turbulent ocean of anxiousness, check out the tips below to strengthen yourself.
- Take a deep in and out-breath when you feel exhausted in the process of teaching
- Do not be stagnant, move around the class and demonstrates your illustrations with your hands
- Ease up and free your mind of any other thought when teaching, just believe that you are doing a good job, in essence, access yourself positively before anyone else does
All of this, if followed will help get your mind to stay calm and relaxed. Nervousness can easily be taken care of if your mind is relaxed and calm.
5. Seek Mentorship/Inspiration from Qualified Professionals
Our last tip on how to be less nervous when teaching is to seek guidance from the right source. A problem shared is half-solved.
Discussing your condition with a qualified friend or counselor might just be the ultimate step to take to end the menace. You might be surprised to discover that you are not the only person undergoing the nervousness challenges.
Even the greatest of minds among the teachers have been found wanting of nervousness on different occasions by experts. Learning about how they deal with such scenarios might just be all you need to recharge yourself.
You can also read books or explore the internet for tips on how to be less nervous when teaching. Thank goodness, it’s a digital world now, you don’t have to walk into a bookshop to read books, every reading material can be gotten online.
Find out- What Jobs One Can Do with a Master’s Degree in Education asides Teaching
Reasons why Teachers Get Nervous:
The first step to solving a problem is to understand the reason for its existence, this is why we have chosen to treat the reasons most people drenched fears when teaching. These include but are not limited to the following-
1. Inadequate preparedness for the subject topic
There is a saying that goes thus “Prior proper preparation prevents poor performance”. Some teachers don’t study or review their books before class.
2. Fear of Failure
Some are just too immersed in the thought of failure, bringing some unnecessary fears into existence.
3. Shyness/Introverted
The introverts tend to be shy, some have extreme crowd-phobia and drench facing a lot of people at the same time
4. Anxious to impress whoever
As stated in the previous section, these are those who chose to make it mandatory for themselves to impress the onlookers. They end up multi-tasking themselves
5. Lack of confidence
Well, this summarizes every other point, doing away with the fear of failure, preparing properly, and avoiding the thought of impressing anyone when teaching may help secure some vote of confidence for you.
Conclusion:
Do we hope you find our tips on how to be less nervous when teaching helpful? Read on, next time from our pages for more interesting and educational posts.
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