When is happening a crisis situation in teacher`s career?

This is a comparative analysis regarding teacher`s needs for training. One item is related to the period when a crisis may occur.

Which was the period of time during your career when most frequent crisis situation happened/occurred?

                                                                         Research 2000       Research 2010

a. In the first year:                                                  33,23%                 49%

b. Between 1 and 3 years                                       26,00%                 27,9%

c. Between 4 and 8 years                                       11, 35%                 10%

d. Between 9 and 15 years                                     12,45%                    5%

e. Between 16 and 20 years                                     6,59%                     2,7%

f. Over 20 years                                                      11,38%                   5,4%

Do colors influence us? What a teacher / a parent must know

An educator (either a parent or a teacher) must take into consideration several elements of the environment surrounding his child. Some of these can have a great impact on him, even though they might be harder to seize upon. I remember an episode that I saw last summer in a park. 

Two children were running down an alley (it was a race, they wanted to know who was faster). The child who won didn’t seem neither stronger nor more athletic than the one who lost. I noticed him though due to his glowing red T-shirt (for that matter, his face was also quite red at the end of the race). I then remembered an interesting experiment which showed that nothing happens by chance and that colors have a serious influence upon our lives. Hill and Barton studied the Olympics playoffs and noticed that those who were wearing the red T-shirt during the game (boxing, wrestling etc.) had 50% more wins than those wearing the blue T-shirt. Then again, the T-shirts were balloted before every confrontation. Red (the color of blood and aggressiveness) worked both as an activator for the one wearing it and as an inhibitor for the opponent. The opposite happened with blue, the color of relaxation, which also symbolizes calmness, unity and leisure.

Guide for motivating teachers (II)

* Excerpt from my book - Motivation for teaching career, Bucharest University Publishing House, 2010 (see entire book in the right column of site)

Exercise 5

What do I need to be more motivated?

Some things are obvious and there can be said that each of us knows very well the things necessary to feel motivated. Generally that is true but this thing happens only at the level of fundamental motives. But your motivation profile is far from being made up only by two-three aspects. We are rather talking about a complex network of elements; the main ones are more difficult to be dealt with because their position in the conscious zone proves the fact that even if you knew what leads in a decrease in your motivation, you have not had the opportunity so far to overcome this state of the art.

In return, the less obvious reasons, which were unconscious as such, have more chances to be solved. Think about the following analogy: the case of shareholders’ general meeting in a firm. You want to convince the meeting, but you have few chances to do so at the level of the main shareholders. However, the “small” shareholders, with little power by themselves can influence the balance of votes for your proposal if they are individually convinced. In the same way, even if the main motivators cannot be solved there is still a chance to support your motivation by listing a more extended enumeration of attractive elements for the teacher career. 

10 things that motivate me to be a teacher: