Flexibility and Adaptability

Flexibility and Adaptability in the classroom are two of most important qualities that every teacher must possess. These
two characteristics also go hand-in-hand with one another. Flexibility is the idea that your plans can change very quickly,
sometimes with notice and sometimes without. Receiving criticism (good and bad) from your advisers is extremely
important in terms of flexibility because it will force you to change up what you are used to doing. Being flexible means
incorporating this feedback into your teaching. Also, on-the-spot changes may also need to me made based on certain
situations in the classroom, often without prior realization. Adaptability is the ability to adapt to change. In general, it is
being able to acclimate yourself to changing roles, job responsibilities, material, and schedules. If you cannot
accommodate for these different aspects of teaching, it will be difficult to give your students the best learning experience
that they could possibly get, and of course that's always the goal!

Application:

As with most "skills", being able to apply them is the most crucial part of showing an understanding of them. Flexibility in
the classroom is one of most important qualities that every teacher must possess. Receiving feedback from your peers
and administrators can be rather intimidating, and then changing your plans in order to accommodate their feedback and
criticism may seem like a daunting task - and it is. Teachers need to be aware that they will always need to be changing
up their teaching styles. Lesson plans are great guides in the classroom, but of course the class cannot always go as
smoothly as it is planned. There will always be interruptions due to rowdy students, disadvantaged students,
misunderstandings when learning, and (more often now than ever) technical difficulties among many other reasons.
When an obstacle arises, you must be able to overcome it smoothly and this could require changing your entire plan for
the day on-the-spot. This can bring up somewhat of a "sink or swim" situation and knowing how to be flexible in your
plans will allow you to swim! As for adaptability, teachers need to be able to be comfortable given a different job
responsibility. It is very possible that when teaching in a distri ct, you may be in two different schools in as many years,
based on what the district needs. It is extremely important that a comfort level is established for him/herself in order to
give the students a proper learning experience. Also, with the ever-changing technology industry, we as teachers must
be able to keep up with and understand the new innovations which could be beneficial to students in the classroom. We
must know how to use them in the best interest of our students, which could require changin g the way that you teach a
particular topic, possibly annually!
Analysis:

One of the most important parts of analysis is being able to organize information in a way that it is easier understood.
This is a situation where being flexible could be very important. Suppose maybe a particular diagram or visual was given
in class in order to help teach a certain topic. It's very possible that maybe particular students are not visual learners and
would rather see the information displayed in a different way. This is where teachers need to be flexible in their lessons,
by being able to come up with some other form to display the information in such a way that it is easier understood for
the students who maybe did not grasp the concept with the first visual. This may require organizing material into several
distinct components (i.e. graphs, tables, text, pictures, etc.). The ability to be able to adapt to a student's needs is
extremely crucial here.

Evaluation:

An evaluation is the idea of judging how well someone performed a task. One of the ways that students are judged or
graded on their work, is by certain criterion that must be met by the student. These criteria are constantly changing,
sometimes provided by the teacher themselves, the school district, or even at the state or federal level. One example of
this would be the NJCCCS standards, which are updated and changed as time goes on, to accommodate for new
innovations and instructional techniques. Teachers must be aware of this, as they may be grading according to an older
version of a rubric, which could be "dating" your students by possibly praising them for work that would not be considered
up-to-date. Standardized testing is another example of this. Teachers need to adapt to the ALWAYS-changing criterion
for standardized tests. Even though, most teachers will not be graders for the tests, they will need to instruct their
students on how to study for the test, and the material that may be on them. For example, an older SAT preparation
teacher may be giving practice tests to students which include an "analogy" section, which is no longer a topic covered on
the test. For this reason, they should not cover that topic, and could spend that time much more wisely on topics that will
be covered on the test. This teacher must be more flexible with their plans and give the students a much more recent
study guide in order to be ready for the exam.