What makes a teacher good?
I want the answer to be black and white. I want to think of teaching like I think of math problems. There is a right and wrong. There should be a manual—Do’s and Don’ts of teaching, and it should include all rights and wrongs. That manual doesn’t exist. If someone claims to write such a guide, someone else can dispute it. I want the answer to my question to be digital, but it is instead analog.
So, what teachers from my high school were exemplary?
Easy: the fun ones. I can’t remember a time where I thought my monotone and overly direct physics teacher had an “exemplary” lesson. No, there’s no “ideal” way to say “-9.8 m/s2” that will keep the whole class involved. Instead, what I saw in high school was that those teachers who could keep students engaged during the downtime or could give them a reason to invest into the classroom were the ones who were able to get their lessons across.
My exemplary teachers were the ones who talked to us like human beings, asked us about our lives, and tried to incorporate those fun little random facts into the lesson. The teachers who joked were the teachers who cared.
The classes I cared about were the ones where I was involved. Being engaged and discovering for myself kept me interested in the course material, and anything I was able to teach someone else never felt like a waste of time.
In the 6th grade, we were shown this pyramid for knowledge retention. To this day, I remind myself of it, and I keep in mind the fact that anything I can teach someone else will be knowledge that won’t leave me. In order for the lesson to stick with students, an exemplary teacher will have students teach each other.
Because of my experiences, I believe lesson planning should follow several main principles in order to be meaningful and useful to the students. These include:
- Discussion-based learning, where students can learn off of each other
- Inquiry-based material to spark further curiosity and conversation
- Including open-ended assignments to allow students to feel capable of creating their own solutions
- Not always having defined right and wrong answers to course-related questions
Ken Robinson’s TED Talk describes why I believe in making creativity the focus in a lesson, rather than keeping things in yes and no answers. I may want the question of an exemplary teacher to be simple and defined, but the real world is not this way. Learning should follow suit.
<blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” data-lang=”en”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>An exemplary teacher gives students the freedom to learn and respond in their own way, even if that way is waiting until the last minute to do an assignment.</p>— will moehring (@wibchib) <a href=”https://twitter.com/wibchib/status/1040086300928483329?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>September 13, 2018</a></blockquote>
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Thanks for your insight! At times it seems a little to easy to say emphatically “I have the answer!” I love the reminder that there really is no manual to being a good teacher.
I think your point that students learn best when they are involved in the lesson and deeply engaged in the material is extremely valuable. My experience tends to mirror yours in that the classrooms where I learned the most are also the classrooms in which I felt I was the most involved with my own learning process and had the most fun. Love the visuals as well!
You are so right about how your most memorable and exemplary teachers were the ones who were fun, creative, and treated you like real people. Being lectured at is definitely not the way to spend an entire year of class. Being involved and having a spark of creativity is exactly what every classroom needs for true learning to happen. What were the classes and teachers that left an impression of exemplary teaching for you? How will you take all these examples of exemplary teaching and apply it to your own classroom?
Awesome post! I really like your outline for how you want to plan your activities and lessons, and your images really tie everything together! The pyramid really puts it into perspective how awful plain old lecturing can be. I know I get bored of it! I do have one question for you: You mentioned that the teachers that you had that were memorable were the ones that were fun. Did you ever have any teachers that were fun in the classroom until they started lecturing? If you did, what was it about their lecture style that made them still memorable enough, but maybe not a great teacher?