This essay will be written in five installments over the next few weeks. Collectively, the essays in A Teacher’s Compass were born of my attempt to conceptualize in plain language (each element is just three words) the essential elements of exceptional teaching. They comprise my credo of teaching, my best advice to the novice and veteran teacher alike. (Each element is discussed more fully in a book I am writing; these essays here are short summaries of the elements.) As always, I encourage replies.
#1 Release Your Personality. When I was in my third or fourth year teaching at a public high school in the Hartford, Connecticut area, one veteran teacher who was highly respected and effective casually made a comment in the then smoke-filled faculty lounge. She said, “Teaching is 99% personality.” Well, that seems a little high to me but the point was well made and the notion stayed with me for the next couple of decades of my career. Teaching is about personality. Theirs (the students) and yours. In fact, everything that happens in the classroom does so in the context of the personalities present. The acts of learning and teaching, reduced to their most basic truths, are steeped in human interactions. No content was ever learned from a teacher outside of this context.
Around the same year this happened, and not completely unrelated to the veteran teacher’s comment, I had an aha! moment in my teaching career that permanently changed my teaching style. Because I was very young when I started teaching – I turned 21 two months into my first year – and because I had the common discouraging experience of classroom management gone awry during my student teaching, I was very careful to maintain great distance between me and the 18 year old seniors I was teaching. More, I thought I was supposed to be that boring, stodgy, and uptight math teacher so many of us have had. So I played this role for my first three years, counter to my true nature and spirit but consistent with control and the math teacher stereotype.
After having three years under my belt with decent classroom management, it was during that fourth year that I decided to allow my own personality, my own true spirit, to come out. Essentially, I released my personality. This is not to say I became interested in being friends with my students. They remained the students and I the teacher, complete with rules and order. But I discovered I could be academically demanding and young-at-heart and free-spirited all at the same time. I look back now and know why the students responded so well to that style and why they outperformed all of the students I had taught years previously. They began to see me as a person – the one I really was – and they could appreciate our interactions. Teaching and learning became authentic. The vulnerability that accompanied releasing my personality was transformed into an atmosphere of trust. That fourth year was a turning point for me and made all the difference in the twenty-plus years that followed. Release your personality. dven.
(to be continued…)
April 30, 2008 at 9:53 pm |
I am currently in my first year of teaching. My student teaching experience was much like you mentioned in your post. Once I received my first job, my classroom personality changed dramatically. Like you, I also have rules in place, but I also can allow myself to show the excitement I have for the material I am teaching, and use my youthfulness to my advantage. Thank you for this post – with all the first-year of teaching uncertainties – I’m glad I’m doing something right!
April 24, 2009 at 11:21 pm |
I like this perspective. Philosophically, I’ve followed the teaching motto “If you can’t make learning fun, at least make it interesting.” But I can see unless one releases their personality neither will happen.
Good input . . . I’m going to take this one to heart.