Category: Week 6 – Your Authentic Teaching Voice

When I was in middle school, my parents told me that being a lecturer at college is the easiest job on earth. You can talk to students freely in 50 min and then leave the classroom to enjoy life. Since then, I have dreamed about becoming a lecturer in university with all the respect, authority, and most importantly an easy and cozy life. Once I was admitted to the university, I found that not every teacher is cool and charming. Instead, boring teachers with unchangeable tone can be the best lullaby. Some teacher’s voice is so low that I cannot hear from the 5th row, whereas another small portion of lecturers speak too fast that I can barely catch up with their pace. That was the first time I felt that being a good teacher is not easy from a student’s perspective.

Going to graduate school gives me more opportunities to get involved in teaching. Last year, I was a teaching assistant for one semester. In this course, the instructor was in another campus, which gave me a rare opportunity to present in every class and act as the mediator in between. The first few class went smoothly, but the situation got tougher as the teaching content became more difficult and complicated. Though the instructor was fully prepared before the class, students still had lots of questions during the class, which greatly hindered the class progress. As a PhD student seating in the classroom, I felt all the knowledge was quite easy and should be understandable, so did the lecturer. Still, as a 4000 level class, students were made up of seniors and master students. The master student tended to be more experienced whereas seniors were struggling for the coursework. In the end, the teacher slowed down the pace for undergrads, and everyone is happy.

Now I cannot help imagine what I should do if this is my class. How to approach to all students at different levels? Like Sarah wrote in the “Finding My Teaching Voice”,

The more I understand of my students, the less important it is to me that I treat them identically. They don’t enter my classroom with identical backgrounds, and they won’t leave it with identical understanding, no matter what I do.

I always believe that no one should be left behind. But simplified the class content or slowing down the class pace is definitely not my preference. But what is the more efficient way to deal with students with diversified background? Back in China, students are categorized into various classes based on their current knowledge level and learning capabilities (e.g. learning speed), especially in high school. Then students with similar background will be taught together with quite good results. However, besides potential discrimination, this approach is still not ideal since one-time exam-based categorization is not accurate. Sometimes, I think about pairing students into two-people small groups, usually with one learning much faster and the other feeling quite miserable in catching up. The class will still be taught at the normal pace, but paired students can help each other after the class. The assessment will be performed on the group basis, as two people will get the average score for their individual homework, quiz, and exam. Through this way, smart students will not feel boring about class content while no one is left behind.

 

I have not taught any class yet, but I have heard lots of stories about teaching since my grandmother and my mother are both teachers. My grandmother used to be a mathematics teacher in a middle school. The school had requirements for each teacher such like the average score of the class should reach 85. And math is such an important subject because all kinds of high school have this subject in their admission exam and everyone tried to gain a higher score. My grandmother was a very harsh teacher and always gave many assignments. She complained that some students were lack of motivation especially those who had poor performances. She found that hard to raise their interests and made them involved in the learning process. My mother is a music teacher in another middle school. I would say music class would get more active interactions with students because it’s a more “fun” subject than math. My mother arranged some of the classes to get students share the music they liked. These classes were the most popular part because all the students feel involved. In order to make the classes more fun, my grandmother adopted the method like my mother used to get students share some puzzles regarding specific chapter. Students got very excited about this procedure and lots of discussion were occurred after the share meeting.

In Professor Fowler’s article, he/she mentioned: Always engage with your students; do not do something “to” them, or “for” them, or “at” them”.  I think this is a key factor that every teacher should pay attention to. Teachers may always consider how to get their voice be heard in the class and neglect that the students also prefer to be heard. It is not very different to prepare a syllabus and the slides for lecture. The challenging part is to give the class in an interesting and efficient way.

I also find the tips mentioned in Professor Fowler’s article very helpful, especially the performance of teaching part. It may be helpful to consider myself as a student and consider what I want to obtain from a class. Teachers always want their voice be heard in the class and require students to make notes about each key learning point. On the other hand, students also want their voices be hear. If teachers could handle it better, the learning process would be far more fun!

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.

It is almost absurd to think that the majority of teachers teaching below the collegiate level typically have years of training, whereas some collegiate teachers merely have a class handed over to them even though they may have zero teaching qualifications. Similar to what was said in Finding My Teaching Voice, I feel that many collegiate professors only know about teaching what they have experienced themselves. This can be both a good thing and bad thing. Some of the practices used by my teachers and professors throughout the years have really stuck with me and are applied into my own teaching. However, I would say with confidence that we have all had what I would consider to be bad teachers, or at least ones that implemented bad teaching practices.

The whole “being a well-liked female professor while still maintaining authority” thing really resonated with me. Especially being fairly close in age to the students, I find it important that they respect me as an authoritative figure, while still feeling comfortable enough to have authentic conversations with me. After all, I feel like I’m there to help them in whatever academic capacity I can. This is what I told my students the other day when I subbed my professor’s class – that I am here to talk with them about internships, graduate school, etc. in addition to the class itself.

For my Graduate Teaching Scholars class, one assignment required students to read Parker J. Palmer’s The Courage to Teach. Although at times a bit monotonous, this book did a great job at discussing one’s authentic self and the importance of this in the scope of teaching and shares a few ideas with Sarah Deel’s article. How cool is it that while our students are trying to figure out who they are, we, as teachers, are also doing the same? The past couple of years I have become more reflective as I read more and more about authenticity in teaching. I think that authenticity requires vulnerability. Lately, I’ve been more ok with being vulnerable in academic life and life in general. Sometimes it is seen as such a bad thing when I’ve beginning to learn that it is actually very powerful.

Although some of these points may seem self-explanatory, The Authentic Teaching Self and Communication Skills document provides concrete examples of how to improve teaching. Through the years I’ve begun to appreciate and become more tuned in to the physical aspects of good teaching. I find myself “hiding” behind the podium sometimes when giving presentations. I’ve worked my way up to walking around a bit. It helps me to relax and typically contributes to a better rapport with students. This is not something I’ve been able to achieve over night. I would both figuratively and literally take baby steps. But I promise that practice helps. Good teaching truly is a process where you’re always re-evaluating yourself. It can be easy to be hard on oneself through this continuous process, but you just have to be ok with the fact that doing something wrong is just fine; you’ll try to do better the next time.

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My authentic teaching self would have to be a teacher that aims to empower the learners within the classroom, I want them to be teachers as well. My goal is for there to be a transfer of information rather than depositing. I do understand that I will have the formal title of lecturer/teacher/professor, and that there will be a power dynamic that I can’t easily remove, as mentioned in  The Authentic Teaching Self and Communication Skills. However, I still believe that the students and I can both be learners in my classroom.

As well as appreciating the role that students play in the learning process, it would be unwise to ignore my role as the teacher. I need to know what my role is in the classroom, and to do so, I need to be confident in my approach to teaching and myself. No matter how prepared one can be, students in the classroom have a way of turning all your lesson plans upside down in a matter of seconds. This is where confidence plays a key role because you will be able to devise a ‘plan e’, after plans a,b, c, d have all failed. This skill doesn’t come overnight though, it comes with practice and failure. However, failure is a powerful learning tool that we cannot ignore, which is why I also welcome it in the classroom, with myself and my students.

So, then the question becomes: what kind of authentic teacher do I want to be? I want to be a teacher who ignores titles and sees my students as equals in order to empower them to be agents in their own education with my support. My goal will be to teach them how to learn so that even when I am not in the classroom, they can teach each other because I have given them the tools , strategies, and independence to do so. Whenever possible, I will let them teach each other by challenging them in class to be creative and come up with the answers to their own questions, with my guided support. However, I will also ensure that they experience structured failure, where their failures allow them to still learn even if they fail to see it immediately. I believe for this to be my authentic teaching style, and I will continue learning until it becomes my defining characteristic.

At the start of this writing, I do not have an idea what kind of a teacher I am. This is a question that I have never thought of before. Or it is just because I did not know that I can decide what I want to be for a job (teaching). Well, this is […]

For me, teaching is a very powerful job, you are building the next generation, that in itself is a scary situation due to making sure that the students are learning valuable knowledge and skills to make better future.

Teaching for me is like acting as a leader in the classroom, you don’t want your students to be scared of you, or think that you are giving them orders to follow so they can get the grade. It’s more about letting them feel that you are in the class with them to guide them to succeed and that you are there for them when they need help or direction to success. In the end, you want them to feel safe, happy, and successful in the classroom.

As an instructional designer, I deal a lot with the content itself and most of the time I actually don’t teach the content I developed. Most of my work is used in e-learning settings, where the role of the teacher create and maintain a collaborative problem-solving environment, where students are allowed to construct their own knowledge, and the teacher acts as a facilitator and guide. It is more of student-centered approach, and I believe that learning is the method and experiences humans go through to acquire new knowledge or skill, and constructed knowledge is what senses learners make of their environment and their experience. So my role as a teacher is to try my best to craft authentic learning experiences for my students so they can gain the most of their learning experience.

 

I’d like to foster a partnership with the students. I envision this as striking a balance between instructor and student responsibility, where the learning environment is the product of both parties’ efforts and engagement.

A starting point could be to have high expectations both for myself and for my students. I will try my best to be prepared for class, to be respectful and fair, to answer questions and offer extra help, but my students are expected to be equally prepared and respectful, and to take charge of their own learning. Perhaps this baseline seems lofty, but I would like to set a common goal that everyone could strive for.

Democratize the classroom, where all parties could have some say on course direction. This does not mean a free-for-all. The instructor should provide a basic framework with supporting rationales, but also allow room for student input and adjustments. This idea came from my Continuum Mechanics professor, who established a baseline method of evaluation for the class but allowed students to decide among themselves how exactly to allocate grades and how many assignments and tests to have. Though students were bummed about having to do tests, they were at least satisfied with the prospect of being able to decide how much the tests mattered in comparison to everything else. I would like my students to have the same feelings of empowerment and the opportunity for collective decision making.

Perhaps fostering a partnership goes beyond the division of responsibility mentioned previously. One of my strengths is being open to different points of views and circumstances, and I could bring this quality to the classroom by treating students as individuals. It seems like a worthwhile effort in establishing a reciprocity, where students could feel like they mattered.

I have reservations of whether this idea of partnership will work, specifically for undergraduate level courses. Thus far, I have only lectured for graduate level classes where the students consisted of my graduate peers. They were already friends, so mutual respect wasn’t hard to come by. They were also graduate students, so they already have some interest in the subject of study and were easy to engage. Doubtful it would be just as easy for undergraduate classes, but I am still willing to try and adjust, if need be. After all, the point is to meet halfway, so both the instructor and the students have to take part in this dynamic…wrestle, push, pull…to create an environment that is unique and meaningful for those involved.

This week, because of the readings and my experience in the class I am teaching, I have been reminded that my teaching style will evolve and change and I should celebrate that.  I think my teaching style is starting to change, or at least the teaching style I am using currently.  I have 2 years… Continue reading The second album →