As we all know, the current trend is to have a student centered classroom where the teaching role becomes less the sage on the stage and more the guide by the side where the teacher's role is to guide the students in their learning.
Believe me, I have had my share of boring teachers who drone on and on. I also have had teachers who were chummy so students had recess all day and we learned very little and I have also had the 'know it all' teacher who thought it was 'beneath' him to be teaching lowly high school students or the 'snotty' professor who didn't want to teach us lowly undergraduates, but wanted to teach only graduate students! I have had them all! So, you want to avoid being boring, know it all or snotty, if you want to engage and win over the trust of your students.
Here are some teacher roles you should avoid according to Warnock in his Teaching Writing Online book: (Warnock, 4, 5)--(The characteristics listed come from Warnock, the definitions come from me!)
1. Sage--In the old days, in a teacher centered classroom, the teacher would give a lecture and the students would just passively absorb the information like filling empty vessels and then take a test to assess lesson mastery. Do not be a sage on the stage! Be the Guide by the Side!
2. Drone--Do not talk in a monotone voice and drone on and on to bore the students. I have had many boring teachers face to face who drone on in their lectures and they get so lost in their lecture they forget the students are there. I used to just tune out long lectures with monotone voices and I would just go home and learn the lesson directly from the reading!
3.Chum--All humans want to be liked. All humans want to be popular. It is easy for teachers to fall into the trap of wanting to be the student's chums. The disadvantage with this approach is you lose the respect of the students and some manipulative students can smell an easy target/easy grader and will walk all over an easy teacher, so don't be a doormat. You have to exercise your authority as the teacher in order to be able to keep your credibility with students.
4. Fool--According to Warnock (4), many face to face teachers are afraid of teaching online because of the amount of writing you have to do, so many novice online teachers are afraid of making too many writing mistakes in front of their students, thus they prefer to teach face to face. I say you should not worry about making writing mistakes. If students do find a mistake, just own up to it, after all we are all human and students do not lose respect for you if you own up to the mistake.
5. Critic--Try not to nitpick your students too much. The opposite of being the chum is being the nitpicker where you nitpick every student error that a student makes. If you over correct students, this makes students more anxious and less likely to want to participate in forums or succeed in class due to student anxiety and low self esteem resulting from over correction. Focus more on the meaning of the message in the forums, and not on the grammar mistakes to encourage students to participate and raise student morale.
It takes experience to know when you are being too chummy or too critical. I will explore this topic in a future blog post. But, it is a delicate line we walk as teachers, how do we know if we are being too chummy, or not chummy enough? How do we know if we are being too critical or not critical enough? For now all I can say is Practice Makes Perfect. One line of wisdom I remember from my mentor is, "As long as students know you care about them and you learn to care about your students' success more than your lesson, you will be a successful teacher."
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