What is Good Teaching ?
Teachers as Change Agents: You can make a big
difference
"We think of the effective teachers we have had over the years with a sense of
recognition, but those who have touched our humanity we remember with a deep
sense of gratitude."
Anonymous student
"The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate 'apparently ordinary' people to
unusual effort. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making
winners out of ordinary people."
K. Patricia Cross
A good teacher is like a candle - it consumes itself to light the way for others.
-- Author Unknown
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All students have had hundreds of teachers in their lifetimes. A very
few of these teachers they would remember as being exceptionally
good. What are the qualities that combine to create an excellent,
memorable teacher? Why do some teachers inspire students to work
three times harder than they normally would, while others inspire
students to avoid their class? Why do students learn more from some
teachers than others?
Here I have focused on the four essential qualities that distinguish
exceptional teachers:
Knowledge,
Communication skills,
Interest, and
Respect for students.
An Experiment
Here's an experiment I had done in one of my earlier assignments.
The results may surprise you. Go into one of the classes you are
teaching and have your students take out a sheet of paper. Ask them
to list for you the qualities they feel are important in a good teacher.
Ask them to identify the qualities they admire in the best teachers they
have had. Then give the students enough time to think about it and
write something down. Five minutes is good, but ten might be better.
Let them answer the questions anonymously if they desire.
What you will get if you combine all of the responses is a fascinating
collage of ideas. I have found that most of the responses fall into two
specific categories:
1) a set of "core qualities" that students recognize in good teachers,
and
2) a set of “specific skills” that are developed by good teachers.
"Core qualities" are the essential characteristics needed to be a good
teacher. I would like to concentrate on these core qualities in this
article as under.
1. Knowledge
Students have consistently and clearly targeted as the number one
quality of a good teacher exactly what you would expect: knowledge
of the subject. You must be an expert in your field-both theoretical
and practical –preferably with an industry interface and experience if
you are going to be a good teacher in a Management college or
Business School. This is a prerequisite.
2. Communication
The second core quality that good teachers possess is the ability to
communicate their knowledge and expertise to their students.
You may be the greatest expert ever in your field, but what would
happen if you lectured in a style and language the students are not
able to comprehend clearly? How much would your students learn?
It is a common misconception at the College level that knowledge of a
subject is all that's required to be a good teacher; that the students
should be willing and able to extract the meat from what you say-
regardless of how it is delivered (even if it is delivered in a
incomprehending language or different style). This might be true at the
post graduate level, but elsewhere it is definitely untrue. It is especially
untrue at the undergraduate level. The teacher's job is to take
advanced knowledge and make it accessible to the students. A good
teacher allows students to understand the material, and to understand
what it means (because it is one thing to understand how nuclear
bombs work, but quite another to understand what nuclear bombs
mean).
A good teacher can take a subject and help make it crystal clear to the
students. A bad teacher can take that same material and make it
impenetrable. Or a bad teacher can devote so little time and effort to
preparation that the material presented is intrinsically confusing and
disorganized. A good teacher is willing to expend the effort needed to
find innovative and creative ways to make complicated ideas
understandable to their students, and to fit new ideas into the context
available to the student. A good teacher can explain complicated
material in a way that students can understand and use.
There is a saying, "Give me a fish and I eat for a day, teach me to fish
and I eat for a lifetime." This is the philosophy of a good teacher. Give
your students an answer and they can solve one problem, but show
students the techniques needed to find the answer for themselves and
they can become self-sufficient in the field. Students need to be shown
how to apply the new techniques you teach to problem solving.
3. Interest
A good teacher starts with a firm knowledge of the subject, and builds
on that with a clarity and understanding designed to help students
master the material. The best teachers then go one step further.
Because good teachers are interested in the material being taught,
they make the class interesting and relevant to the students.
Knowledge is worthless unless it is delivered to the students in a form
they can understand. But the effort expended making the material
understandable is wasted if the students are disinterested when it is
delivered, or if the students can see no point in learning the material.
Good teachers recognise this, and work hard to make their material
relevant. They show students how the material will apply to their lives
and their careers. Bad teachers make material "relevant" by
threatening students with failure on a test. Good teachers go far
beyond this: they make students want to learn the material by making
it interesting.
This is one of the things that makes industry and business examples
so important and vital to learning in a business school or
[Link] interface and practical real life examples make the
ideas discussed in class exciting and important to the teacher, as well
as to the students. If the teacher isn't interested in what's being
taught, then why should the students be?
4. Respect
Good teachers always possess these three core qualities: knowledge,
the ability to convey to students an understanding of that knowledge,
and the ability to make the material interesting and relevant to
students. Complementing these three is a fourth: quality: good
teachers have a deep-seated concern and respect for the students in
the classroom. Why else would a teacher put in the time and effort
needed to create a high quality class?
The creation of a good class requires an immense amount of work. You
don't simply come up with clear explanations,industry cases and
examples and experiments for the class off the top of your head. You
don't create fair, consistent, high quality tests,questionaires and
homework assignments (read "learning experiences") five minutes
before you hand them out. You don't figure out ways to integrate new
materials and research into a class in an understandable way on your
way to your college or institute in the morning. You work at this sort of
quality all the time. You spend time with your students so you can
learn about holes in their understanding. You read and write and
create to build an exciting and interesting class every day. The only
thing that would drive you to do that is a concern and respect for the
students in your classroom.
Conclusion
When you strive and work to become a good teacher and to create a
good class, the four core qualities are essential:knowledge,the skills to
convey that knowledge,the ability to make the material you are
teaching interesting and relevant,and a deep-seated respect for the
[Link] these four core qualities,good teaching will just not
exist and take place.