My Authentic Teaching Self

In reading the material this week, I was able to really capture and relate to the work by Sarah Deel. After being a professional student for so many years, we fail to truly understand the time and preparation being on the other side of the classroom means. At times when I think of what I would or will do when I am teaching a classroom, the simple thought of “Well I will just do what my previous teachers did” comes to mind. But what exactly does that entail?

After taking this course, and having some opportunities to think more deeply into the teaching and pedagogical process, I am aware that there is so much to consider. Not only from my perspective but also considering the culture of your institution, the background of your class, how the material you are teaching is changing over time. The things to consider grow exponentially when you really start to think about it. And presenting the information to students who are learning it the first time can be daunting.

That is why I enjoyed navigating through Dr. Deel’s self discovery of “finding my teaching voice”. For those of us that are more technically minded, we often strive to find a process or solution that works and can be implemented at later times on similar occasions. It was nice to see her approach and evolution to finding out that what she needed to do was to basically “be herself” and not try to emulate other professors she though were good.

Similar points were discussed highlighted by Dr. Fowler, although she did mentioned acting a few times I can see where it is applicable. I think one aspect which ins’t discussed on the job description, is that on top of teaching we are trying to motivate and excite students into our research interests. And to do that we need to be or “act” excited about our material and why what we are teaching is applicable to them for the purposes of the course but also how it comes into play in the daunting “real-world” that we are preparing them for.

Therapy Time

A quick disclaimer: This week’s readings and prompt hit me at an interesting time. Beginning the second and final year of my MA program, I am beginning to seriously think about what life will be like after grad school. Do I still want teaching to be an important part of my future and if so, what will that teaching look like? Needless to say, a prompt about finding my authentic teaching self really struck a chord and got me thinking about my future and myself. A wise individual once told me that some writing is for others and some writing is for you. Sometimes writing winds up being a way of essentially saying your thoughts out loud to make sense of them rather than conveying ideas to a reader. I think that this piece of writing is really more for me than for others, but I decided to post it anyway because I think that it is a good example of the process that we all go through when we start to think about our authentic teaching selves. With that said, on with the post…

 

This week we are talking about finding your authentic teaching self. In other words, its therapy time. Once upon a time, many years ago, undergraduate me didn’t understand why education programs were so focused on touchy feely stuff. Then I started to actually teach at the middle/high school level and I understood why – because teaching requires an emotional commitment, both towards your content and your students and because teaching will bring every ounce of your self-doubt and insecurity to the surface, regardless of how deep you thought you had buried it. I believe that teaching is an incredibly intense and personal act and thinking about how you teach inherently involves thinking about yourself as a person. In “Finding My Teaching Voice,” Sarah Deel stresses the importance of basing your teaching style on your personality, rather than trying to copy what other “successful” teachers do. This idea meshed with what I have already been told about teaching. During my internships for my MAED degree, teachers would always remind me that I had to find what worked for me, rather than copying what worked for someone else. Having said all that, I’m not sure that I’ve ever really spent much time thinking about my authentic teaching self, probably because to do so, I would first have to approach a much more intimidating question…

So who am I?

That’s a complicated question. Who I am sitting in a classroom of relative strangers is not the same thing as who I am when I’m with my family or my friends. Around strangers I am quiet, passive, calm reluctant to talk, (but willing when the time is right), careful with my words, not standoffish but also not engaging, humble and reserved. Around people I have known for a long time I am still humble, but also stubborn when I know (or think) I’m right. I am calm, but also passionate about people and ideas. Often times I’m still quite, but I’m also prone to be blunt, almost unreasonably argumentative, and frequently sarcastic, although also loyal and caring.

Which is the real me? Is my public persona just some front because I’m afraid that people won’t like me if I’m more open with them? Or is that quiet, reserved, guy just another facet of my personality, one that’s every bit as genuine as the one I wear around the people that I’m close with? More to the point, which persona is appropriate for my authentic teaching self? Sherri Fowler stresses the importance of being genuine and I know that my reserved self has a tendency to be superficially cool and reserved, regardless of how I actually feel.   I think that sometimes this leads me to hide my passion, especially in front of students, for fear of appearing weird. Sherri Fowler also talks about the importance of being attentive to your student’s needs.  My less reserved self is a lot more likely to accidentally say something stupid that could perpetually wreck my relationship with students or even, depending on the circumstance, cause them some level of emotional harm. On the other hand, my reserved self is a lot less likely to convey that I care about my students.

Maybe I’m oversimplifying all of this. One of the reoccurring themes from my readings and research in history is that binaries tend to oversimplify and obscure. In reality, my self is probably a shifting continuum, changing with each circumstance. The question then, is where I need to fall on that continuum when I’m in the classroom and how to go about making sure that I wind up where I need to be. I know that I will be humble, calm, and a little bit reserved, because quite frankly I think I’m incapable of anything else. I know that I will need to embrace my social awkwardness so that I can be genuine and engaging with my students, while still retaining enough social anxiety to keep me from saying something that I shouldn’t say. I also know that I will need to convey my passion, both for history and for my students, but I also know that I will convey this passion in a calm, reserved way. Moving beyond the touchy-feely aspects of my teaching self, I know that discussion will be a major part of my classroom time, because I don’t have the speaking chops to consistently pull off an engaging lecture. Moreover, I know that my classes will have a heavy focus on concepts and critical thinking, because I tend to think analytically, but also because I believe this will help my students develop skills that will hopefully make them better citizens, and, God willing, make this world a better place.

Of course, finding my authentic teaching self is only half the battle. The other half is actually making this self a reality in the classroom. Theory is inherently simpler than practice and I believe the next step will be to determine the routines, both inside and outside of the classroom, that will help me make my teaching self a reality.

Discovering Authentic Teaching Self

I never teched any kind of classes in my life yet. When I was trying to come up with the idea of authentic teaching self, the first word desperately popped up in my mind was preciseness. As a non-native speaker imaging himself teaching in a foreign country, the word preciseness could have a great chance be the first thing on his mind. Aspects like preciseness could be a few steps away from a teaching philosophy but it is definitely an important principle for teaching. Similar to a society need ethics and laws to keep both humanity and order, education needs to have the upper-level philosophy as well as fundamental principles. The requirement of preciseness coming from my personal concern about the language, since teaching a class is way different from one-on-one conversation. Misinterpretations can be effectively and easily clarified during the in-person conversation but can be hard to be explained in a class. If confusion keeps happening in a classroom, students may gradually lose interest in the class. We definitely will have the chance and method to appropriately adjust what we imperfect on our early stage teaching. Addition to that, aware that as an experienceless teacher, making mistakes is inevitable, but I would believe that having a mind caring about preciseness in advance will help guarantee the convey of messages. The article “Finding My Teaching Voice” by Sarah Dell mentioned a perspective that I never thought of before, maintaining the boundary between students and teachers. I once had an instructor who was really close to his students, everyone feels like friends to him. Surprisingly, he is also one of the instructors that gained most of the respects from students and the course that semester worked out pretty good. Thus I see a sustainable boundary as a formation of respects and trusts from both students and instructors. It’s not about the way of teaching, it can be either intimating way of teaching or lecturing methods, but building up an atmosphere that students are willing to learn that at the same time motivate instructors.

Discovering one’s Authentic Teaching Self

When I started penning down my thoughts for this post, I imagined myself as a teacher, teaching something I want people to know about, something which I will be able to contribute as a teacher, and providing my students sufficient information so that they can make a decision on whether their like/dislike that particular subject. I think it is important for a teacher to realize that the subject he/she is teaching may not be the favorite subject of the students and so it should not be implied that the students will have the same passion for the subject as the teacher has.

Further, when I began thinking about what kind of teacher I am or want to be. I started to recall all my previous teachers and what I found common was that all the teachers had a more narrative style of teaching, however, their styles were different from each other. Maybe that is the reason I still remember what I learned in those classes and could connect to those lessons in real life scenarios. For the same reason, I would like to imagine myself more as a ‘storyteller’ than a teacher. Though, I realize that it does not work always. But I would like to interact as a storyteller as and when possible.

I would like to share a small instructing experience from my Masters here. Although it is not related to storytelling. I was an instructor in my Masters for a surveying lab of the undergraduate students which was more like an instruction-oriented class where there were set procedures to use equipment and perform the analysis. Most of the activities for this class was conducted in groups and it was a bit tricky to know if each of the group members is involved in conducting the experiment. In every lab class, before I began instructing the students, I used to point out to my students, what is the relevance of the exercise and at the end of the 3-hour lab would randomly pick a person from each group to talk about the fun and the boring part of the exercise. This was just a small action to make them speak up about their experiment and be more involved in the activity. In order to make most group members participate, I would give an extra point to the group, if all the members spoke something. This made them take a little more interest than they would have been. The point I am trying to make through this example is I cared less about their procedures or analysis as it could have been learned by any manual whenever they would need to do it. But it is important for them to understand the objective of the exercise.

In the future, when I would teach, I would try to incorporate the narrative style to deliver what I want the students to know and at the same time make sure that my students should know why they are doing, what they are doing.

WEEK 5: “I Yam What I Yam”

I take my inspiration this week from Popeye, because if there’s anyone who really doesn’t give a flying saucer in space what anybody thinks, it’s that guy.

Anywhooo…

I was reading the posts of my fellow students, and there was a consensus that, in spite of everything else we’ve seen about how to be a Good Teacher™, authenticity is key. Heath’s post about how to negotiate the delicate balance between our many selves in and out of the classroom was especially striking to me: we have all been alive long enough to realize that we contain multitudes, but we are entering a phase of life in which we must strike a balance between authenticity and professional presentability. Before we entered these positions of relative authority (to our students, at least–and in some cases, our children), we were able to be more or less unfiltered in our interactions with others.

Some of us have been curating our public selves for years now, especially if we are shy or otherwise protective of more intimate aspects of ourselves, but the level of curation must now increase to such a degree that we have to maintain a guard when we are with our students, but as Heath mentioned in his post, that can give us the appearance of unapproachability or standoffishness, which is definitely not what we want to convey to those whom we are meant to teach. However, there may be a way to project our good intentions and authentic personalities to our students without being inappropriately informal with them (because, despite how much we want to maintain a rapport, there is still a power differential that makes a true friendship tricky, and arguably impossible for the duration of the student-teacher relationship): in the comments to Heath’s post, I mentioned the idea of three axes of Our Teaching Selves™ (borrowing from @rinaley‘s comment earlier in the thread): the x-axis is our level of introversion/extraversion, the y-axis is our professional enthusiasm, and the z-axis is the degree to which the other traits are presented in a social situation. I offered myself as the example: my x-values would be relatively low, because I am an introvert, my y-values would be high because I am enthusiastic about my chosen field or profession (if I were, say, an aerospace engineer, they would be significantly lower, because I would have absolutely no idea what I was doing and would likely be failing all my classes), and my z-axis would be variable, depending on the situation. In the classroom, it would be much higher because there is a certain threshold of interest necessary to even be in the class, let alone actually pay attention, and much lower in the outer world because there are fewer people outside my department and the university who even know or care what I do on a daily basis. So for me, I suppose my authentic teaching self would be who I am normally with some adjustments for social context, in other words, “I yam what I yam” (a huge nerd who gets way too into her metaphors), but I gesticulate a little less wildly when I’m in class.

My Experience with Adapting Teaching to Different Cultures

Although I have never had a classroom teaching experience, I was a private tutor for around five years in my undergrad, and a GTA responsible for a circuits/electronics help group during my first year at tech. Even though my teaching style never changed, I quickly realized that I had to tweak how I interact with students to cater for my new and more diverse audience.

As most Lebanese people, i tend to be very sarcastic in my daily life interactions. And during my run as a private tutor, I always used sarcasm to entertain and create a bond with my students. This approach was very successful and students responded well, especially since most, if not all, of them where middle to high school boys who had the tendency to be mischievous. I could always capture their attention for around 2 hours, but at the cost of spending the better part of around 30 min discussing random off-topic  issues. All in all my approach was successful, leading to improvement in my student’s understanding of the material.

Now lets jump to when i started my GTA here at Tech. I was quite confident in my approach, and, as expected, many students were able to relate with my friendly and sarcastic personality. However, others did not. I ended up with a group of students who specifically waited for my help, and others that completely avoided me. At first this phenomenon was pretty strange to me, I
wasn’t sure exactly what was happening. However,  after a while, i started to notice the dumbfound faces of students each time I gave a sarcastic remark. I have to admit, it took me a while to realize that people were misinterpreting me, especially because i come form a country where sarcasm is so deeply rooted in society, it has become second nature. After this realization, I had to change my interaction approach. Primarily, I tried to tone down my sarcasm until i figured out how much the student I am currently helping would appreciate. After all my purpose is to help all student, not just the ones that can relate to my character.

As a closing remark, I am always true to my self, I never completely changed my interaction approach, rather I adapted my interactions to my audience. I tried to find a balance between the way I want to interact with people and the way people want to be interacted with.

POST 4: “Teaching is not all about the teacher..”

In reading Shelly Fowler’s piece on The Authentic Teaching Self and Communication Skills, I was presently surprised at the impact Fowler’s perspective had on me. Oftentimes, unless we are forced to stop and actually think about the authenticity that goes into teaching, we forget to actually do it. I am appreciative of this piece because of its ability to force that out of me, regardless of how elementary some of these points may have seemed (no offense to Fowler).

However, with all of that being said, the one thing that really resonated with me was the professor’s fourth point where they explain what exactly being the authentic teaching self means.

In said point, Fowler explains that, as my title suggests, “teaching is not all about the teacher; that is, teaching is not all about you.” Furthermore, the professor explains that as the teacher, you have to be present and aware of who you are in the classroom and what you are doing. However, what I think stood out most to me as a reader and teacher is the importance of taking a “step outside of yourself,” in order to be more,”attentive to the students and not make the classroom your stage with the students as a passive audience.”

As a Public Speaking TA who is in charge of roughly 80 students per semester, that final point has become by far the most important aspect of my role as the teacher.

Oftentimes I get so caught up in the ease of teaching and the relaxed nature that my role provides that I forget how difficult this course can be for people. For clarity, when I say difficult, I don’t mean long and strenuous equations that take hours to complete or full memorization of our upper respiratory system and it’s subsequent functions. What I mean by difficult is that this course is often very uncomfortable and stressful for students and even the most confident of public speakers find themselves uneasy come speech day.

Because of this, my ability to “step outside” of myself has become absolutely crucial to my students success. Furthermore, given the nature of the course and how hard it can be for students, being attentive to students has become a duty of mine, so to speak.

However, the thing about public speaking is that it lends itself to completing this fourth step. I have the flexibility to step outside of myself and be attentive to each and every student because I have to. As Fowler explains, you do have to take the specific course into consideration and I very much do that. My concern is that the completion of this step might not be the case in every course. Moreover, this might not be the case as I continue on in my career (teaching or otherwise) and that causes a bit of concern for me. Personally, I think it is imperative that we are able to disconnect from being the center of attention when it comes to teaching and I place high value on authenticity through attentiveness to every individual.

With that being said, my question is this: How am I to complete this step in the event that my career goes beyond that of teaching? If I hold this step high atop my list of “must haves” in terms of authentic teaching (or leadership), how can I ensure that I am able to properly incorporate it into every aspect of my career, or even life?

If you have gotten this far I appreciate you sticking around and very much look forward to hearing your responses!

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