Hi Everyone,
I hope this week finds you well. Here are my depictions of my best and worst teachers. I hope you find them entertaining.
Last year as I was finishing my AS in Intelligence Operations, I decided to take Introduction to Education as an elective. When I signed up for the class, I thought that the class would be useful as a way to learn more about the education process since I worked teaching at the Intelligence school. Upon looking at the syllabus, I realized that I may have made a mistake since the class was geared towards the K-12 setting. After the first day of class, I brought up my concerns about the applicability of the class to my professional life to Ms. W, and Ms. W listened to my concerns and then further explained to me that even though the class was geared towards the K-12 level, she would help incorporate some items that I could use in my classroom to help me out. It was at that point that I chose to stay in the class and found one of the teachers that I wanted to emulate.
Ms. W primarily taught through two teaching methods. She taught her classes through lecture and problem based discussion. Ms. W would start each class with a problem based discussion by talking to us about an incident or interesting item that happened during her day job as a high-school social studies teacher. I didn’t realize it then, and I am not sure if Ms. W realized it while she was doing it, as it seemed as her way of passing the time and chatting with her students prior to class, but in talking to her students about her day, Ms. W was “setting the hook” that would keep us interested throughout her lecture. In hindsight, most of the items Ms. W would bring up about her day directly related to the subject of her lecture.
The interesting part of the timeline that Ms. W had in her class was that she would not get mad if a student was late and would usually start the class “late” after talking about her day with the students for 10 to 15 minutes after the class would have “officially” started. Sometimes though, the conversations would last up to an hour of the three hours allotted for the class period. The conversations were structured as informal conversations where she would bring up a problem encountered during the work day where “she was not sure if she had done the right thing” and would ask the students in the class for our insights as to how we would deal with the situation. Since the conversations started before class and on the surface appeared to be her asking us for a “sanity check” the classroom environment was informal and without pressure to perform. As a student this made it really easy for my peers and I to present our opinions during the classroom opening and made it really comfortable for us to answer any questions posed during the lecture.
For her lectures, Ms. W would talk to us. While this may not seem like much of a big deal, as a student, being talked to versus being talked at showed that Ms. K respected the existing knowledge and experiences that we brought to the class. To clarify what I mean by talked to versus talked at, Ms. W would adjust her lecture to match her audience. For example, she would add in snippets or questions about teaching adults in her lecture to keep me engaged. For other students, such as the two students that were early childhood education professionals, she would tie in the lesson to early childhood education or ask those specific students for their insight as to how the day’s lesson applies to their daily lives. She would not do this only for those of us that were in the teaching profession, she seemed to get to know her students by the third class and was constantly tying our hobbies, jobs, and experiences into her lectures by asking for our insights during key points of the lesson. As a result, I would look forward to attending her class every Tuesday and Thursday and did not miss any of her classes throughout the semester.
While Ms. W is what I consider the “gold standard” in the quality of teachers that I have experienced, that same semester, I was privileged to have attended another class from a great instructor at that college. That semester I also took an acting class taught by Mr. M. While Mr. M was a phenomenal actor, he was not a trained educator, but instead was what I consider to be a “natural” teacher. To give you a little background on Mr. M, he is a classically trained actor who has some film and television credits that was hired by the college to teach acting due to his Master’s Degree in Acting. I am not sure what brought Mr. M to our small town, but after our class completed, he left the area because he got landed a part in a movie that is filming in New York.
Mr. M primarily taught by having us work through the acting process by having us do various acting exercises that would help us understand the objective of the lesson. In many ways, his classes were geared primarily to visual and kinesthetic learners. The reason that I place Mr. M as one of my best instructors is because while many of the acting exercises we had to perform were embarrassing, he created a classroom environment were all of the students were eager to attempt the exercises. Mr. M created this environment by leading the way and showing us what the exercise looks like prior to doing an exercise. Additionally, while he let us laugh at ourselves, he maintained only one rule for the class. That rule was that we were not to make fun of someone.
In one of our early classes, when everyone in the class is an unknown entity, Mr M. taught us how to act in the improv style. At first everyone was very timid until Mr. M got up there and made a fool of himself. At that point the ice was broken and he had the 201 student (it was a multilevel class) jumped in and made a fool of himself as well!. At that point Mr. M had his “first follower” which made it a lot easier for us to jump in and participate. Overall, it was Mr. M’s confidence in himself and his ability to make the classroom environment both fun and open that helped us easily participate in the more embarrassing exercises.
The third teacher that I have had a positive experience was in a Foundations of Instructional Techniques (FIT) seminar that was taught by Ms. P. To give you some background on Ms. P, she is an Ed.D. candidate that provides professional development seminars to instructors at our institution. When I attended the FIT seminar, I went with a little bit of a chip on my shoulder since many of the subjects that we were going to cover during the seminar were items that I had either studied during this program or was currently studying at the time. In a nutshell, I felt like it would be a waste of my time. Like usual, I was wrong.
The big thing that I noticed about Ms. P is that she was very well prepared to teach her class. While the class as a whole ended up being a quick overview of the principles of adult learning, the VAK leaning styles theory, and the multiple intelligences theory, the preparation that Ms. P placed into the class and the creative ways that she taught the VAK learning styles theory is what stuck with me the most.
When Ms. P taught the VAK learning styles theory, she had us make three paper airplanes. The first time, she read the directions on how to make a paper airplane and then had us throw the airplane to see if it worked. Some of us finished this section faster than others. Then she gave us a diagram of the paper airplane and had us build the airplane and fly it. Lastly, she showed us how to build a paper airplane while we followed her directions. While this was going on, I realized that with so many moving parts to the exercise, Ms. P seemed very well rehearsed and was able to anticipate any errors that the students were having on the exercise. Another thing that I noticed with Ms. P was that she did not rush any of the lessons. Her behavior was quite the opposite, she appeared to take as much time as needed to get to the teaching points in her lesson plan, but at the end of every section of the class, we were perfectly on schedule. I am still not sure how she did it, but I suspect that her level of preparation for the class and her level of knowledge in the subject allowed her to quickly and effectively assess when we had reached each of the teaching points allowing her to cut out portions of the class that had been already covered effectively saving her time.
From the student perspective, it caused our class to feel as if it ran very smoothly, and that we were not wasting our time in the seminar covering items that we already know. It led to all of the students to look forward to each of the portions of the seminar because we felt as if we were learning the mastery instead of time.
Now for my “bad” instructors.
The first one was my Psychology 101 instructor at the community college that I attended prior to coming to Bellevue. I unfortunately do not remember her name, so let’s call her Unprepared. As a person, I liked Unprepared, she was a very talkative person and personality wise, appeared to genuinely care about her fellow man. As an instructor however, she did not teach.
On our first day of class, Unprepared greeted the class, went over the syllabus and assigned us 100 vocabulary words to write up prior to the next week’s class. Then she let us go for the night. The class lasted for maybe thirty minutes. The next class, we started the class by having each student read a definition until all of the definitions were read. This gave the students who did not do the homework the opportunity to catch up on any items they may have missed. After all of the definitions were read, she assigned 100 more definitions for us to look up and released the class. The class lasted one hour. The third class was conducted in the same manner as the previous class. Then we had our first test. Our first test was a closed book multiple choice test with 300 questions. Each question was one of the vocabulary words and we were supposed to match the correct definition with the word. At that point I asked the teacher to speak with her privately, once outside I explained to her that she was wasting my time with those type of assignments and that I was dropping the class.
Overall, it seems as if the teacher did not take her class seriously or thought that rote memorization equated to learning. As a student, I quickly interpreted her lack of challenging work as carelessness in her work and ultimately as her just working for a paycheck. This led me to have a negative impression of the instructor and drop the class as a quick cost-benefit analysis placed the free time that I would lose in taking that class as a higher value than the money I would lose in dropping the class.
The next instructor that I will talk about shall be named Captain Obvious. At work, during the soldiers training holidays, we usually have faculty development classes that are created by the cadre to help develop our overall instructional skill. In this case, Captain Obvious was tasked with creating a class that would give the instructors an overview and functional training on the Socratic teaching method. The problems started early in the class with Captain Obvious quickly and efficiently explaining to the class that even though he does not believe in all of this “ALM 2015 crap” (ALM 2015 is the Army Learning Model for 2015, basically using student centered teaching techniques) he was tasked to teach this class so he will try to make it as painless as possible. At that point Captain Obvious lectured directly from the training slide package that he was supposed to use to teach us about the Socratic Method while taking the time to highlight all of the negative aspects of the training method.
The class had a highly negative effect with most of the students. For those students who had not heard of the Socratic teaching method, his class turned them away from trying the technique. For those students who actively practiced the Socratic teaching method, his actions caused us to mentally shut down and count the minutes until the class was done. Overall none of the students took the subject matter seriously because if the instructor did not care enough about the subject he was teaching, then they would not need to care about the subject either.
Lastly, the third instructor that I will bring up shall be named Mr. Favoritism. Mr. Favoritism was my high school English teacher during my junior year of high school. Overall, Mr. Favoritism was a very good teacher and in some ways one of the best teachers that I ever had, except for an incident during a discussion between the teacher and I where I realized that he was not the person that I expected.
At the beginning of the school year, I was one of Mr. Favoritism’s favorite students. I was in his honors class and my brother had been in his class two years before so he had a good working relationship with my parents. He also had already known me through my brother so we had a good working relationship. Early on, he would spend extra time working with me and making sure that I understood what was expected of me. Overall, I was easily getting A’s in his class and was progressing quickly enough to realize that getting into a university was easily going to be a possibility. Mr. Favoritism and I would have discussions before and after class about the university that I would choose to apply to at the end of the school year and during my senior year.
As I looked at the financial commitments required to attend a university, I realized that I would have to rely heavily on scholarships, loans and what little money my parents would be able to spend. At the time it did not seem to be the best financial decision for myself or my family. So I decided to join the Army Reserve and go to the local community college. I let the teacher know that I would not be applying to any universities and instead to work through the military/community college route upon graduating from high school. He lost his temper and told me “that is why you will always fail, and your people never become anything other than workers”. While upsetting, I now understand that most likely it was his anger at working with me and hoping that I would be one of the students to make it out of the standard life for people where I am from that led him to make that comment. I can understand anger and do not hold it against him.
However, his actions immediately following that class and for the rest of the year are what make him a poor teacher. After angering the teacher by choosing not to directly go to a university, I was deemed no longer worthy of the teacher’s time. From that point on, all of my questions went unanswered and I was effectively non-existent in the classroom. It appears to me that all of the assignments that I would turn in were graded more closely and I got lower grades on assignments overall. As far as my behavior went, I went from being an actively engaged student with aspirations to score highly on every assignment to a student who only placed any effort on my assignments because I did not want to get in trouble with my parents at home.
The biggest thing that I learned from this experience is that while early in the year I was one of the favorites, there were plenty of students in that class who were never favorites and therefore never got quality instruction from that teacher. As an instructor, I do not think that it is my place to choose who the “winners” are and who the “losers” are. It is my job to do my best to teach everyone to the best of my ability because my actions will have a direct effect on how my students perform. I look forward to your comments to my post and to reading your posts this week!
Fred
