The topic this week is discovering your authentic teaching self. To be honest, I have never officially taught a class before. My only experience as a teacher was the summer before I started my study at college. Because I did a quite good job at the College Entrance Exam, some friends of my mom sent their kids to me and asked me to help on their study. I was actually more like a TA than a teacher that summer because I didn’t need to teach the kids new contents. Most of time, I was teaching them how to solve problems that they had trouble with. But I saw that a valuable experience, which made me think about how to become a better teacher in a classroom.
Putting the lesson I learnt from my role as a student over 20 years and my limited teaching experience together, I think there are couple things a good teacher should be clear before getting into the classroom. First of all, knowing what you want the students to get from the class. Students know very little about a discipline before they get into the classroom. The teachers’ responsibility is to introduce what’s out there in this discipline and maybe stimulate students’ interests in some specific topics. However I’ve seen some professors spend a lot of time one specific field in the class, which means they won’t have enough time to cover the rest of contents as they should. So if I am going to teach a class in the future, I will take some time think about what the students should learn from my class.
The other thing that I noticed important and would definitely want to improve is to teach confidently and energetically in classroom. As a student, I always find I learn most efficiently when the teachers are confident and energetic. The passion from the teachers certainly affect students’ attitude in learning. Giving a lecture with exactly same voice and tune just makes students sleepy and easily distracted. As an international student, I sometimes feel not confident in front of native speakers. I don’t want this happen in my class when I am the teacher. With that being said, I wish I could have a clear understanding of what to teach and be confident in classroom when I teach in the future.
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I think “time management” and “organization” are two very important skills that teachers need to have.One may have really good content to deliver, however, if the time management is poor, one may not deliver the intended content effectively and efficiently. I have had some teachers who were really good at explaining things, however they were never able to finish on time and left us with contents to study on our own.
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I think that what you say about “knowing what you want the students to get from the class” is extremely important. I have been in classes where the professor wants to communicate so many things at once that at the end we do not learn anything. I also think that the passion, attitude, and enthusiasm of the professors also influence the student’s engagement.
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I also like your comment about knowing what students want out of the class. But how do you engage students that only want a grade and not the knowledge? Things have become so competitive that students only care about the A and not learning. How can we inspire them to care?
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You have some great reflections which have sparked some really interesting conversations! I think it can be so valuable to reflect on your teaching style even before you formally teach a class. And it sounds like you have some valuable experiences teaching and helping students learn and grow even if those experiences were not formally teaching a class.
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Sometimes I feel the teacher-student relationship go both ways. Students want teachers to be energetic and engaging, while teachers also want to see their hard work and preparation pay off. I know that in some class, though the teacher is quite confident and very familiar with the content, students in the back row are still sleeping or doing other things (like reading the social media and sending messages). From the teacher’s perspective, seeing these behaviors can be quite frustrating, and they may not have enough time to get to know this student’s background for only one semester.
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