The Skills That Set High-Impact Educators Apart
Educational priorities shift with time. Teachers who began working 15 years ago were significantly less dependent on digital technology than they are today. Teachers who were licensed four years ago knew nothing of how Artificial Intelligence (AI) would impact their classrooms. Who could even say what the concerns of tomorrow will be?
Nevertheless, there are certain high-impact skills that transcend the concerns of our time. These attributes are important for high-impact educators, no matter what is going on in the wider world around them. In this article, we take a look at high-impact skills that are important to the world of education careers.
Classroom Management
Many aspiring educators fail to take into consideration just how difficult this will be. You know the material, but how can you teach it to 30 well-meaning but often misbehaving kids in a small room? With time, most high-impact educators learn how to redirect undesirable behavior with simple things like their posture or facial expression, but these skills take time to develop.
There are several factors that go into effective classroom management. Can you redirect undesirable behavior without interrupting the flow of your lecture? Can you have a difficult talk with a student without making them feel discouraged in the long run? Can you manage redirects that don't need to be repeated every five minutes? Keep in mind that the answers to these questions will vary from year to year. Even experienced teachers sometimes struggle to manage behaviors from particularly difficult classes.
Resilience
Admittedly intangible and certainly difficult to measure, resilience is what keeps teachers in the game. You'll use it a lot. How else does a tired teacher work two hours extra to finish grading papers because they were consoling a sobbing child during their plan period? How do special educators live with the fact that they have a room full of eighth graders about to go into high school with a second-grade reading level?
Resiliency in education means accepting hardship and remembering that no matter how difficult things feel, you're still making an impact. This is something that is developed with time, and even then, imperfectly. Veteran teachers do still feel down in the dumps some days. The key is to be able to push forward and work through it.
Communication
A natural, but sometimes elusive, element of the job as an educator, it's not just about teaching the content. You need to be able to frame it, present it, and re-explain it in the communication style that resonates the most with your students. This, like so many other educational talents, is something that will fluctuate based on the child you're dealing with.
Adaptability
There are so many variables in any given classroom. Johnny's being disruptive. Susie just threw up. Michael put his head down on the desk again. And even though you're supposed to move on to a different learning module, you just realized that half the class still doesn't really grasp the skills required. It still doesn't grasp the topics from the last unit.
What do all of these situations have in common, besides the fact that they're virtually inevitable? The only way out is through adaptability. As a teacher, you have to accept the fact that things will never be perfect. Rarely will they even be ideal. Your job is to work with what you've been given.
Digital Technology Awareness
This is a skill that can never be fully mastered. Digital technology awareness must be continuously renewed. Often, this is something that schools will make particular efforts to develop through workshops, seminars, and other continuous training opportunities. The good news, of course, is that no teacher needs to constantly keep an eye out for what's new and in development. The district will prioritize these educational opportunities based on the tools that they would like to integrate into classrooms.
Often—and in no small part because public school budgets are often pretty tight—digital technology integration happens fairly gradually in the classroom. There are exceptions. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic rapidly accelerated the need to understand digital communication technologies. For the most part, however, it takes time for schools to change the tools that they use.
Compassion
Finally, compassion. About 63% of public schools are Title I eligible. What does this mean in practical terms? It means that there is a lot of struggle out there. Every child is going through something, be it scarcity of resources at home or some other personal obstacle that can turn into a barrier.
Good teachers can recognize the complete needs of their students. They aren't always able to find a solution for every problem that enters their classroom. But even recognizing that this complexity exists can improve their ability to take the complete needs of their students into account. Learning is the primary priority and certainly the teacher's main job. Every student is unique and complex, and compassion helps teachers do a better job of taking the entirety of their classroom's needs into account.
Conclusion
It may feel stressful to understand the need to learn, balance, and maintain all of these skills to become a high-impact educator. In certain ways, it is, but there are a few things to keep in mind. The first is that, day in and day out, your primary responsibility will always be teaching. Continuous education initiatives will always be there, but they happen gradually and in the background.
The other thing—upskilling as a teacher is often done with pleasure. Not always, of course. Some training mandates are inconvenient or tedious, but in many cases, teachers are glad to learn more, knowing that it will improve their ability to educate their students.
If you are interested in becoming a teacher, don't stress too much about the complexity of the role. Difficult though the job can be, the credentialing process is designed well, and with the object of ensuring you have all the skills you need to succeed in mind.
