Teachers are in charge of a huge fan of responsibilities, it's common knowledge, but nobody really takes a moment to think about what we are capable of doing:
taking into account the way our students' brains process and store information; choosing and combining methods and approaches which are suitable for each setting; teaching metacognition strategies to our students in order to help them become independent of us one day; performing several roles, multitask, i.e. explain a topic while tying a kid's shoelaces; finding out the different learning styles and intelligences present in our classroom; putting into practice a variety of classroom management strategies, solving spontaneous problems which solutions are not written in teacher's books, but one of the most important things we, teachers, deal with is motivation. As the great pedagogue, Philippe Meirieu said: “We cannot content to give something to drink to the ones who are already thirsty. It's also necessary to provide with something to drink to those who don't want to drink”, in order to reach reluctant students' motivation, we need to build brick by brick a good rapport, show them our true colours and encourage them to do the same. We must show that we are genuinely interested in their lives.
Additionally, we should make activities meaningful. That's the way we will get our students to work and become independent learners, ask yourself: Who do you think will be fond of talking about things that are meaningless and unnatural? It's preferable to get your students talking about things they are keen on like the football match they watched last night or their favourite music band.
