Hi Devin, thank you so much for your comment! I totally agree with you that trial and error is really helpful when you are trying to figure out your own teaching style. Though, it can be rough at times. As well as I think at different points in our lives, we will have different teaching styles. I hope that my non-classroom education role will help in the transition to the classroom if I do end up deciding to go into academia.

That’s a good point about research being reproduced. Here’s a report about reproducibility that you may be interested in: https://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-reproducibility-1.19970

Dana,

Thank you for you comments. Generally I wouldn’t post this kind of blog entry either, but in the interests of moving myself towards the middle ground I talked about in my blog, I thought that this might be beneficial.
-Heath

Hi Medha,

I think it’s really great that you’ve stopped to question your own assumptions! I’m not sure what your field/background is, but in Human Development, we are always talking about individual differences so it seems second nature to us consider and integrate many different learning styles in our classes. However, this isn’t intuitive and it isn’t outright taught in many fields, so that you’re making these considerations now is really wonderful!

Hi Zellie,

I can really empathize with the struggle of being impressed by and trying to emulate teachers around you, then finding that you can’t quite pull off what they do. However, the self-awareness and growth that comes from that trial and error is really helpful in establishing an individual identity as a leader and an educator!

I think your non-classroom leadership and education role is really cool and will undoubtedly help you if your goals ever find you in a classroom.

Hi Leslie,

Even though I haven’t started teaching on my own, I identify with a lot of what you’re saying.

I’m reminded of the stair-step approach discussed by Michael Wesch during our first week of class- our departments aren’t throwing us to the wolves of undergraduate students to see who makes it out alive, but rather they are building a network of support to build our skills and confidence of budding teachers.

I’m glad to hear other departments at Tech do take teaching seriously and devote necessary resources!

You make a good point about the notion of flexibility in teaching approaches. I love, in particular, your line of “After all my purpose is to help all student, not just the ones that can relate to my character.”

When I first began teaching, I wondered about the balance of being authentic and individualizing my care for each student, and being some cold authoritative non-me of a human. While I realized of course that the latter doesn’t necessarily work for anyone (unless, I don’t know, if cold and authoritative really is who a person is), I too found that genuineness and earnestness don’t need to translate as unprofessional or off-putting. So, what I guess I’m trying to get at here is that, I agree, you should stay true to yourself and not completely change your approach to your interactions; we just all need to practice gauging the levels of chill/humor/sarcastic humor/whatever that a student can handle—especially students from cultures who could misinterpret our intentions.

This (Cherice’s post and both of the comments so far) is so helpful for the concerns I’ve had about going into teaching junior and female (even with the benefits of race in my case). I had considered transparency as a way to get students to engage, but not as a respect-builder. Honestly, I glazed over the writer’s section on making activities and pedagogy transparent and didn’t fully consider the potential significance of this.

LikeLike

Great post this week. You covered a lot of ground with your list. I love the idea of using a few minutes at the front end of class to share the plan & what the students should expect to gain from their time in class on that day. I like the idea of some non-course related chitchat, but I think it a better use of everyone’s time to do that before class starts. With a class as big as ours, for instance, letting the majority of folks weigh in on a non-related topic could easily derail the entire lesson plan. (You know how it goes in our discussions… sometimes it takes 45+ minutes to just get comments out of 6-8 people.) There may also be some students who are irritated by the off-topic discussions, so this may not be a great strategy for all. BUT, I do love the idea of using the apps for polling to ask a question to the whole group and then share the result to the class in a couple of minutes at the beginning. Everyone gets to engage and provide input, but without taking up all the “air time” of the course.

I think this is a super interesting question to explore!! Have you seen this work well in different classroom settings before? If so, tell me more! I am always interested in learning new strategies for engaging with my students and developing the human relationship that is often ignored outside of what happens between a mentor and their student.

I appreciate that you were willing to write more of a “for me” than “for others” post here. I had a lot of similar thoughts while trying to figure out what to write and ended up with a short and insignificant post because I didn’t want this sort of thing to be part of my online presence as a researcher. It’s nice that there are people willing to put out “talking yourself through it” style content in a way that I can’t.