Great students make great teachers

Will your students look back and remember you as the person who shaped their lives?

A great teacher is one a student cherishes forever. Teachers have a longlasting impact on the lives of their students, and the best students inspire their teachers, too. Years ago, as a young, eager student, I would have told you that a great teacher was someone who provided classroom entertainment and focused very little on discipline and assignments. Now, after working for 35 years in education including 26 years of heading institutions and related administrative experience and having been involved in hundreds of teacher evaluations, my perspective has changed. My current position as a professor of higher education gives me the opportunity to share what I have learnt with current and future college faculty administrators and through friendly banter with my postgraduate students about what it means to be a great teacher.

Attitude is key

Teaching is hard work, and great teachers work tirelessly to create a challenging and nurturing environment for their students. Great teaching seems to have less to do with our knowledge and skills than with our attitude towards our students or our subject. Greatness in teaching is just as rare as greatness in medicine, dance, law or any other profession. Although the qualities that make great teachers are not easy to inculcate or duplicate, understanding these qualities can give all teachers a standard of excellence to strive for and guide higher education institutions in their efforts to recruit and retain the best teachers.

To that end, I offer the following observations about the key characteristics of great teachers. This list is certainly not exhaustive, and the characteristics do not appear in any particular order of importance but are based on the singular premise that for a teacher to be called great, the students must also aspire to be great.

Respect: In a great teacher’s classroom, each person’s ideas and opinions are valued. It takes a lot of confidence for students to feel safe to express their feelings and learn to respect and listen to others. This facilitates a welcoming learning environment for all students. Facilitating questions is mandatory.

A sense of belonging: The mutual respect in a classroom provides a supportive, collaborative environment. In this way there is an acceptance of a certain structure where there are rules to follow and assignments to be done, and each student is aware that he or she is an important, integral part of the group.

Good students know that they can depend not only on the teacher but also on the entire class. Presentations, assignments and project deadlines are welcomed.

Accessibility and Care: Teachers who are approachable, not only for students but for everyone on campus, can find solutions to any problems or concerns. Great teachers who possess good listening skills ensure that every student leaves his personal baggage outside the school doors. The problems of the young must be handled flexibly.

Shared expectations: Students generally give teachers as much or as little as is expected of them. Teachers realise that their expectations of their students greatly affect their achievement. Variations in grades serve as positive reinforcements.

Love of learning: Great teachers inspire students with their passion for education and constantly renew themselves as professionals in their quest to provide students with the highest quality of education possible. As a result, the student has no fear of learning new approaches or incorporating new technologies into presentations. Customised guidance is useful.

Skilled leadership: Effective teachers focus on shared decisionmaking and teamwork, as well as on community building. As a result, students take up opportunities to assume leadership roles. Nominations, posts, responsibility and accountability are cherished.

Creativity and Innovation: Brilliant students find new ways to make presentations to make sure that every other student understands the key concepts. The teacher also responds with concerted guidance. Shifting gears is the order of the day.

Collaboration: Rather than thinking of themselves as weak because they seek help, great students view collaboration as a way to learn from a fellow professional. A great teacher uses constructive criticism and advice as an opportunity to grow as an educator. Age, experience and seniority cannot be imposed.

Professionalism: Good students emulate teachers in different ways from personal appearance to organisational skills and preparedness for each day besides exemplary communication skills. The respect that the great teacher receives because of her professional manner is obvious to those around her. Role modelling is a creative way of teaching.

While teaching is a gift that seems to come quite naturally to some, others have to work overtime to achieve the great-teacher status. Yet, the payoff is enormous for both you and your students. Imagine students thinking of you as that great teacher they had in college! No one can produce a complete and definitive list of the characteristics of great classroom teaching but I hope that this list provides a starting place.

Knowing the qualities of greatness can help teachers strive for the highest standards and help educationists, professors, teachers, and administrators jointly craft preservice training or in-service programmes that build on these qualities.

The writer is the advisor and dean for the programmes of MSW and MHRM at D.G.Vaishnav College, Chennai.

Source | The Hindu | 6 September 2015

Reading for its own sake

When was the last time you picked up a book or a magazine for pure pleasure?

Many of my friends in the teaching fraternity were happy to hear author Amitav Ghosh tell a young woman that the best advice he had for a writer-in-the-making was “to read.” It’s something we keep telling our own students, but (we tend to think) it is one advice that is disregarded the most. But then, those same students would ask, aren’t we reading all the time? What, other than reading, are we doing each time we pick up a book to study for an examination or a test? If you search online for the distinction between the terms, as I just did, you’d be hard pressed to find a clear one. “Studying is an advanced form of reading,” says one contributor on quora.com. Wikipedia defines reading as “the act or process of studying.”

But let us set aside those academic or dictionary distinctions, for the time being, and get to what I mean by reading. Not studying. Not swotting from notes for an exam. Not going over and over the textbook to memorise definitions or descriptions. Not poring over a reference text in order to add to the classroom lecture.

With all the information around us, we are spending more and more time engaging with texts of different kinds. We scan Facebook posts and Twitter feeds, we click on video links and laugh at visual and verbal memes that come our way, we look at articles that our friends share so that we can either like them or add a comment, thus marking our participation in the great online social space.

But when was the last time you picked up a book or a magazine for pure pleasure and curiosity, without your fingers itching to hit a “like” or a “share” or type in a smart comment? Again, I am not talking about the hurried scanning of headlines on paper or screen that most of us do before we rush out each morning, but a more sustained, sitting-down submersion in words.

Reading for its own sake is what we are talking about here. There is a difference between this and reading for the purpose of knowledge acquisition — although I would argue that reading of all kinds leads to knowledge gain in the long run (much of what I know about life in the Roman empire comes from the Asterix comics). When you study, there is a certain anxiety that keeps you focused only on what is necessary for that exam or test. Purposive reading (to learn, to understand, to remember) is limited by its purpose. When you read without that anxiety, your mind is free to wander about and make connections with other things you’ve read, to relate what you are reading to your own life and experiences, or to stop and think and consider something the writer has said. This kind of reading also develops the ability to look beyond the surface meanings of the words to what is held between them. When we are freed from purpose, our minds can begin to appreciate a piece of writing more fully.

When we read this way, it feeds back into our academic reading — that is, reading as a process of studying. We become more efficient readers because we are able to scan a text quickly and grasp its meaning without too much difficulty. We can figure out which parts of the text are important and which ones are only supportive. While reading a novel, for instance, we know that description is used to set a scene while action and dialogue move the plot forward. Over time, as we read more novels, we understand where to pay attention, where to dwell on the words and where to skim over them. We get the plot even if we don’t always get the details.

I hate to think that I am advocating reading for pleasure as a way to improve one’s ability to read academically — that would seem to be self-defeating! The hope is that even if people begin reading because they think it is useful, they will begin to enjoy it for its own sake!

Granted, the time we have for extra-curricular reading is gradually being eaten away by other, supposedly more urgent tasks (like moving to the next level on our favourite gaming app or catching up on social media). But we also have more reading material available to us today than at any point of time in the past. Books are easier to get, more people are writing about more subjects, and they are also available in a variety of forms such as e-books and audiobooks. That would imply that more people are reading. So, perhaps my colleagues and I are wrong about young people not reading. So, maybe it’s not so much about whether people are reading, but about how they are reading?

Source | The Hindu | 6 September 2015