Reflection 2

Stimulus Skills and Reinforcement of Student Participation

                
 What is stimulus skill?

According to Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, word ‘stimulus’ means something that helps somebody or something to develop better or more quickly. That means that stimulus skill is the skill to help somebody or something to develop better or more quickly. In this case, the skill relates to the teacher in the school. As a teacher, people should have skills to stimulate their students, increase their active participation, enthusiasm and spirit of study. Besides, the teacher also should have skills to create a good atmosphere in the class.

Teacher movement is very important to create a good atmosphere. Just imagine if the teacher just stands stiffly on the front of the class. It will be boring and does not make sense. What the teacher should do is move freely and relax to avoid fear and to control the students’ behavior. When the teacher explains the material, he/she has to make sure that the students are paying their attention to him/her. Besides, write on the board while talking or walking around all the time can make the students lose their concentration. So never do that. The teacher should better move slowly from the back to the front to observe the whole class than doing that.

Teacher gesture also influences the students’ attention. Too much gesture makes the students lose their concentration because the gestures will grab their more attention. Just do some gesture that he/she has to do in need. For example, move hands and fingers to describe things, measurements, etc. Nodding heads will be good to show agreements with the students. Then, the teacher’s voice should loud enough for the whole class so the message will clear and understandable.

Technically, the teacher can use some interaction style in order to make a good teaching technique such as: teacher-students interaction style and students-students interaction style. Keeping the eye contact is good to control interaction between the teacher and the students trough emotional expression.

Reinforcement for the active students is positive feedback to the students. The teacher can give verbal reinforcement (good!! Excellent!! Great!! Or Yes, that’s right!) to attract the students participation. Non-verbal reinforcement is also good for the students considering the students may come from different speech community. In this case, the teacher should be careful of the gesture. It will be better if the teacher uses general gestures understood by the whole people. E.g. smiling, nodding, showing up one thumb, etc.