Post 364: What is your Teaching Persona? (Social Presence)

Post 364: What is your Teaching Persona? (Social Presence)

In the previous blog post, I said you should avoid being too chummy with your students, but at the same time, you should avoid being too nitpicky with your students. How do you know which is which? How do you know if your teaching persona is too chummy or too nitpicky?

For me, the answer to that question was, "It took practice."  In the beginning of my teaching career, I was WAY too chummy. I wanted too much to be liked by my high school students. And as you know when teenagers smell an easy mark, they go all in.

Because the high school students thought I was an easy grader, my classroom had no discipline. Students talked while I talked. Students paid no attention to my lesson. 

When students went off task during a lesson, I was not quick enough to punish them. In fact, I was reluctant to punish them because I feared, 'they would not like me'. Now THAT reaction is the 'being too chummy' reaction said my teaching mentor who shook her head disapprovingly when she saw me hesitate punishing students who disobeyed class rules.

I was giving a French Unit exam. The grade would have made up 50% of their final grade for that quarter. Almost all the students were quietly taking their test.  Then, my mentor and I noticed a student talking to another student and exchanging notes. They were disobeying the rule of "No talking during a test" and rule #2, "No cheating or exchanging notes during a test."  At first, I just stood there and let it go. I think I was just too shocked to react.

When the other students noticed my hesitation, they too started to take out their notes and cheat. My teaching mentor took immediate action unlike me. She went straight to the talking cheating students, took their tests away and gave them both an automatic F.  Instantly, the other students put away their notes, were quiet, went on task and followed class rules to take a quiet test.  I learned then that if I wanted to be respected and not be 'chummy' I had to take immediate action if I saw any infraction to class rules to gain student respect.

In a face to face class, it takes practice to figure out your teaching persona. Are you Dragon Lady or Chummy Teacher or a little of both?

In the online environment, you can also have varying teaching personas. My teaching colleague was very chummy with her online students. She wanted her students to feel comfortable around her so when she wrote her emails or announcements, she used no capital letters.

Example: my name is jane. i am your english teacher for this class. feel free to email me any time if you have any questions!

I said to Jane, if you are their English teacher, shouldn't you be writing in correct English? (Jane was my mentor and I was shadowing/auditing her class to learn how to teach online)

Jane said, "I want to project an informal teaching persona so students know that I am human."

Now for the purposes of Social Presence, (how you project yourself online to students), you should make yourself human and approachable especially since online students cannot see your physically. So, Jane said, not using capitals equalizes the playing field saying we are all the same, students and teacher.

It is up to you as an online teacher on how you want to project your online teaching persona. George Collison in his book, Facilitating Online Teaching, gives very helpful tips on how you can project your teaching persona onine--here are a few teaching personas you can adopt--Generative Guide, Conceptual Facilitator, Reflective Guide, Personal Muse, Mediator and Project Leader.  In future blog posts, I will delineate in more details these teaching personas which will give you an excellent social presence in your online classes.