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January 27, 2006

How to be a Great Teacher

I have quite a bit of teaching experience. A couple of semesters of composition, a long period of literacy work, and a couple of years of teaching non-technical people computer programming basics. It's true that teaching gets easier with practise, but I am here to tell you that nothing, absolutely nothing, is as good at teaching you how to be a good teacher as being a student with teaching experience.

It's really simple. You get to see somebody else make all the mistakes. You get to compare their style to yours and notice things you never noticed before. Just like the realization when you first stand up in front of the classroom: Oh my god, the teacher really can see and hear everything that happens in here. But in reverse.

So I decided to start keeping track of some of the mistakes I see my teachers make, and some notes for myself on being a better teacher. Bear in mind, this is not a criticism of my professors. All my teachers are great, the state certainly doesn't pay them very well, they have to try to cram lots of material into the typical ten-week quarter system, and the outdated equipment and materials available are embarrassing when you consider that this is the world's fifth largest economy running this place. But they are mostly not teachers by vocation: most of my teachers are engineers or architects or construction managers or what have you, first and foremost, and they give up no small number of billable hours to come give us the latest, greatest, and most relevant information. So there's a lot they can learn about teaching.

Technorati Tags: advice, school, teaching

Know what is on your overheads
The biggest mistake I see is that the teacher just grabs the Powerpoint presentation the textbook company provided and uses it. Without reading through it, first. Or they copy something out of a book onto transparencies, but don't read it through. Sometimes, I see a teacher get visibly surprised by something on a transparency they just put on the projector face. That should just not be happening. It just makes you look like you don't know what you're doing, which makes students tune out and stop learning. I see this all the time. It is always really bad. Go through the slides before class and do us all a favour.

Reward students for attending class
This is somewhat self-serving because I pretty much never skip class, but it has a point. Of course there is a value to learning the subject from a teacher, or we would not attend college, so make that value tangible. Give students some information in class that they can't get anywhere else. Give them access to your professional skills, to your knowledge of the field, to things that really do not come on books or web sites.

If you have a real attendance problem, have pop quizzes. One of those the second week of class and then irregularly thereafter fixes habitual class-cutting quite nicely.

Come to class on time and start on time
It's not just about returning the respect the class attenders have given you by showing up. Let us imagine a theoretical 50-minute class. That's pretty typical for a lecture class in the other colleges at Cal Poly. If you don't get started on time, you've wasted a large percentage of your class time, and you're already squeezed for time to present the material in a quarter. Teachers get way behind by starting a little late every day. For one class, we ended up leaving out two weeks of planned lessons (from eleven weeks of classes) because we got so behind. So if we had to continue to the next level, we'd have to make up that missed information. As it was, I just studied the stuff on my own, because I was done with that series of classes but I needed the information.

Have a point
Know what you want to teach in a given class session beforehand. Plan it out for the quarter or semester so you can fit the curriculum requirements in, and check to make sure you're on track every week. If you start to get off on a tangent because of good questions, pull yourself back. Maybe you have only three things you really need to hammer home one day, but don't settle for only getting to two of them. Drop details and embellishments if you have to. Having a point will also keep you from wandering off, mentally.

Work out technical details outside of class
It's a sad reality that most of the work of teaching goes on outside of the classroom. You need to work out lesson plans, grade homework and make notes about what your students have generally gotten wrong, and most of all, you need to know that you can walk into the classroom and work the projector or make the screen come down, or whatever. There's some leeway for this on the first day, but you should not spend class time setting up your gear.

Don't turn all the lights out when students need to take notes
It is impossible to see enough to take legible notes in pitch dark. Yeah, your gorgeous slides will look washed out with a couple of lights on, and not all rooms are conducive to mere dimming or turning off half the lights. But there are solutions. If it's daytime, you can leave a blind partially open. At night you can bring in a lamp to provide dim light. You can get assigned to a better classroom. But don't leave your students totally in the dark, because you're being unfair to them by making it harder for them to learn.

When slides or lectures are packed with detailed information, put it in a handout
Students learn best when they are taking notes, not dictation. If you want them to know verbatim word definitions or to have a table of data at hand, for heaven's sake don't waste time by having them copy it down by hand. Put the details in a handout and let them just take notes on the important stuff.

Don't take notes for your students
A lot of teachers will make their Powerpoints available to students. I generally think that is a bad idea. Sure, it takes time to distill the details down into a handout, but I think handouts and student-taken notes work best. A lot of my classmates think they can just skip lectures because "the notes are online."

Make decisions about deadlines outside of class
If you ask a class when they want their homework to be due, they will obviously tell you the date furthest in the future that it could possibly reasonably be. So take that as a given. If, during lecture, it is clear that you need more time to teach the homework subject, make a decision about when it should be due then, there, yourself, but otherwise, those lengthy "how about Tuesday?" negotiating sessions are a waste of time you could be spending teaching.

Use your authority
Also known as "no, you are not our friend." Teachers get in a great deal of trouble by seeming to be pushovers. You get students who decide it's perfectly fine to skip class, and talk during the lecture, and get up and walk out while you are talking, and they disrupt the other students and they can make it hard for you to concentrate. As the teacher, you lay the ground rules, and you're doing nobody any favours by making it seem like anything goes.

Don't talk to the blackboard
Known as Physics Professor's Syndrome, the tendency to keep looking at the blackboard after you've finished writing is strong. Avoid it at all possible costs, because nobody in the back can hear you. Personally, I always hated chalkboards and whiteboards, and I used to use overheads when lecturing. That let me keep an eye on students who are winking out in the back rows. But you don't always have that choice, so if you do use the boards, keep a mental process running to remember to turn around.

Don't yell in a small classroom
Students sitting in the front row should not need ear plugs to avoid hearing damage. It's hard to get the right vocal levels for a lecture hall, but once you've figured that out, remember you have a small-classroom voice, too.

Share not just the fact that you love your subject, but why
I love how my engineering teacher started this quarter. He stood up in front of us and told us how much he loved concrete. Not just by saying so (he did), but by showing us how much affection he had for it and how great concrete can be. You don't see that very often. I've had some teachers who seemed to actively dislike their subjects, and maybe they did. Or others who felt they were teaching a class below their abilities, or others who were ready for retirement and clearly half out the door. Classes like that are unbearable. You can't get excited, and if you do get interested the teacher kills it dead. And if the teacher says they love the topic and yet appears to teach only because they "have to," they are not even remotely credible.

And last, but not least, because to be honest you would hardly think it would happen more than once:

Cancel class when you are sick
Do not sneeze on your students. Seriously.

Posted by ayse on 01/27/06 at 9:23 PM