Thirteen Teacher Personae

Edward R. O’Neill

One teacher is as different from another as chalk from cheese, to use a British expression.

Different teachers use different styles and approaches, package information in different ways, give varying degrees of control to their students, and can be more or less effective under various conditions.

Like snowflakes, every teacher is doubtless unique. And yet teachers tend to resemble each other according to certain definite types. Approaches to teaching tend to cluster together to give us profiles of whole ways of teaching. Each cluster forms a clear persona: a mask or set of traits which is recognizable and resembles a person and personality without actually being a person. People take on personae without the personae being people.

A combinations of traits makes a role or mask. The metaphor is dramatic, theatrical, or performative, and we know from thinkers like Kenneth Burke and Erving Goffman that theatrical metaphors can be very powerful in analyzing social life. The word “person” itself derives from the Latin word for mask: persona.

Spend any time working with teachers, and you may find as I have that thirteen teaching personae emerge with some clarity, clustered in three clumps. These personae are easy to describe, and everyone will likely recall having had at least one teacher of each persona. They are…

…the communicators:

• the storyteller,
• the information transmitter,
• the systematizer,
• the analyzer,
• the provocateur;

…the boosters:

• the taskmaster,
• the coach,
• the facilitator,
• the friend,

…the preachers:

• the entertainer,
• the evangelist,
• the mystic,
• the holy fool.

The communicators focus on transmitting information. They mostly talk. The ‘locus of control’ in the classroom is the professor: the professor is the center of attention and runs the show. She is the ‘sage on the stage’ and not the ‘guide on the side.’

One notable kind of communicator is the storyteller. The storyteller tells stories. Narrative is the ‘package’ or container in which she transmits information. The narrative may detail historical events, how a painting came to be made or popular or unpopular or considered a masterpiece, or the story may recount the invention of scientific concepts and procedures. Whatever the content, a story holds the content and makes it engaging.

Stories have many advantages. Stories seem fundamental to human consciousness: we don’t know any human tribes who don’t tell stories. Stories encode our history, our values, dreams, wish, and conflicts. We have a special kind of memory (episodic memory) which stores narratives very nicely.

Stories have points-of-view. The story itself is always told from some vantage or perspective, and stories usually contain more than one agent, hence more than one potential viewpoint.

Stories can provoke strongly moral feelings without reducing to a moral. Hearing stories, we often feel strongly that this or that action was good or bad, noble or savage, justified or reckless.

Some disciplines lend themselves better than others to storytelling: the humanities, notably, but also the social sciences. The hard sciences and engineering can also tell compelling stories: about heroic discoveries, flashes of insight, and problems solved by dint of elbow grease and mental prowess.

No discipline has a monopoly on good stories.

Less enticing but often very valuable is the information transmitter. Where the storyteller shares information about people doing things in time, the information transmitter handles fewer stories and more other types of information. For the storyteller, the story is a frame or a canvas upon which all kinds of facts and ideas may be wrought, but the story is the main thing. The information transmitter, by contrast, conveys information clearly: facts, dates, principles, you name it. It’s all organized, and students appreciate being able to take clear notes. The information transmitter almost speaks in notes.

There is a downside to information transmission. Stories are juicy, where information tends to be on the dry side. And information can easily become thin and disconnected from the richness of human experience. Information is easier to remember when it’s well-organized, but it can be hard to connect with anything else, and information not organized is barely worthy of the name.

The systematizer is a kind of information transmitter, but the emphasis is on the organization of the information, the pattern, the whole. It’s not just a pattern: it’s a system, a whole connected by logic in large and small details.

The systematizer makes tables and charts. The course topic is a tree with branches. Everything fits neatly into a place, and nothing appears in two places at once. Systematizer’s make wonderful teachers for introductory courses. They make knowledge seem unified and coherent. Many contradictions get glossed over, but the whole system is so neat, memorization is facilitated. To feel you understand the big picture: this is a heady experience, and a happy one in a lower-level course. The student feels “I got it! I see!”–even if it’s a neat trick of perspective.

The analyzer works in the other direction. She takes problems and concepts and breaks them down, smashes them, demolishes them bit by bit. No issue is too small not to be broken down into smaller pieces. The analyzer is a partisan of Zeno: there is no smallest piece of substance, no atom. Analysis goes on forever. Nothing there is that can’t be analyzed.

Where a system is a structure, analysis is a skill. And so the analyzer may not care about structure or even information. An issue or poem or problem can be taken apart infinitely. There’s little question of putting the pieces back together. The fun is in seeing how the watch ticks: not repairing it or building one from scratch.

Finally, another communicator is the provocateur. As the name implies, she provokes. She may not have a position of her own, or she may hold one position dogmatically. She may not transmit information. She analyzes mostly in passing. Mostly, she attacks. She may set up a straw man, she may play devil’s advocate, or engage in Socratic dialogue. When the provocateur presents information, it’s always to challenge: an author, an idea, assumptions — or the student. The provocateur grabs you by the lapels and shakes you. You are not left unchanged by the provocateur, unless you’re merely annoyed.

A second category of teaching personae are the boosters: everything they do is in support of you the learner doing something. The boosters aren’t a show you watch: you are the show, and you cannot be passive. The locus of control, who’s making things happen, has shifted from teacher to student. It’s no longer information types that play the organizing role (stories, facts, systems, etc.): it’s actions. The booster makes the learner a do-er, not a receiver.

The taskmaster poses the toughest tasks. She has no patience for kid stuff. Her students learn that they will either succeed at the highest level, or they will be left behind. Failure is not an option. Mediocrity is not an option. The bar is set high, and in the best cases, there is support to match it.

The taskmaster puts the student on the defensive and the offensive. You must be ready to be challenged, to withstand a challenge, or to hang your head in shame. The taskmaster can inspire or defeat. Some students walk away stronger: some limp away never to return.

The coach is a kinder, gentler taskmaster. Hurdles there are, but they are not set so high. They start out easy and get harder. But the slope of difficulty, while perhaps always seeming just beyond the learner’s reach, turns out in the end always to have been just challenging enough.

The coach is never mean. She may be disappointed. She may be tough. But she encourages as much as she challenges. There is no sense of judgment in failure, because grave failures are avoided, smaller failures learned from, triumphs celebrated, no matter how small.

Less in control are the facilitator and the friend. The facilitator is a technician. She guides, eases, helps, makes things happen. All the action may be amongst the students. The facilitator just smooths things along, makes sure things get done. The learner always moves forward. Moments of “stuckness” are eased away with grace. When the student is doing well, the facilitator almost disappears. No more guidance is added than is needed, and sometimes the best guidance is no guidance at all, perhaps a nod and a smile.

The friend is less technical and more emotional and social. Unlike the facilitator, the friend is never invisible. The friend is the learner’s equal. The hierarchy of knowledge and authority does not disappear, but it diminishes in its social aspects to a mere sliver. The student feels understood and liked by the friend, and the friend is genuine with the student. As much social hierarchy has been removed as is possible — but no more. There may be coaching and facilitating, but the main element in the relationship is camaraderie and support. It is as close as equality as you can get in a relationship that is fundamentally unequal.

A very different cluster of personae are the preachers. Like the communicators, the preachers have the locus of control. They do not inform so much as inspire. The preacher may be in charge, but her mission is to change the student in a deep and fundamental way. This is no mere transfer of information.

Here the three clusters start to blur.

The provocateur is halfway between the information transmitters and the preachers, but closer to the informative side. The provocateur is in one way the most passionate of communicators, in another way the most communicative of preachers.

Another midway point between preacher and communicator is the entertainer. She is both communicator and preacher, but the only gospel she has to preach is: enthusiasm. This is preaching without dogma, sometimes without message. The entertainer keeps the students involved at all costs. She is the center of attention, the locus of control. There is little mystery to what the entertainer does, although it is extraordinarily hard to do it well. The content may not be rich, but it is impossible to look away.

Amongst the preachers proper, the evangelist is the truest to form. The evangelist is passionate about the discipline, the topic, the field. She is the department’s best sales rep. She brings in majors. When she stops teaching the intro class, enrollment plummets. Everyone who hears her talk about sociology or biology practically runs to change majors. When she speaks, her field is the best there is: it illuminates the human condition and holds the hope for the future of mankind. It’s also crazy cool. The evangelist may tell stories or convey information, but the passion is all.

The mystic has little information to share, and that little bit is elusive and contradictory. The mystic almost does not communicate at all: she rather lures the student into mysteries at the heart of the discipline; these are bottomless issues whose fathoming provokes rapture. The mystic does not communicate but rather provokes, but the target is not this or that scholar or argument: it’s all quiet, settled notions which let the mind rest easy. There is no comfortingly systematic overview: systems are the bunk; they fall apart at the seams, not through analysis but with one quick twist of perspectives. The mystic’s students enjoy minds both roiled and still.

The mystic’s more amusing cousin is the holy fool. The holy fool is an entertainer but one who startles with riddles and enigmas. The holy fool invites the learner to become involved with knowledge and at the same time to be deeply skeptical of the folly of human wisdom. Human wisdom is mere foolishness, and so the greatest wisdom is to be found in folly. Learning is joyful, empty, and deep — all at the same time. There is no information worth transmitting, no system worth speaking of, except to have a laugh.

Each persona is of course the embodiment of a skill: telling stories, conveying information, building systems, entertaining, motivating, etc. Each skill is a strength, but every strength outstrips itself and falls over into its own form of weakness.

And so each teacher persona finds conditions under which it is more and less effective. Like seasoning in food, each by itself lacks something, a few balanced carefully make something harmonious, the wrong mix is disharmonious, and too many flavors is just a mess.

Stories may not lend themselves to analysis or systematization. Taskmasters can make you perform, but you may not be motivated to remember. The entertainer may enrapture without inspiring. The evangelist may inspire without imparting the knowledge and skill necessary to succeed. The mystic may mystify rather than illuminating. And so each strength without balance undermines itself.

Some skills fit neatly together, and others contrast but complement. Systematizers and analyzers are virtually cousins, likewise entertainers and storytellers. The evangelist may be a storyteller, the storyteller a mystic, but the entertainer is seldom an analyzer, nor a systematizer, nor a taskmaster.

Teaching personae are neither good nor bad: only learning makes it so. We could add well-known personae which are negative. Some just invert a strength: the bore, the wanderer, the confusing, the disorganized, the pedant. But even the teacher who seems to do nothing resembling teaching can be effective at least in forcing the student to teach herself, which some say is the best result of all.

So often we think, quite wrongly, of teaching as some kind of application of the rules of learning: mix motivation and goals like baking soda and vinegar, and a chemical reaction ensures, a papier-mâché volcano of learning. But nothing could be further from the truth.

And people are people, and they are interested in people as people, and so we might encourage faculty in different disciplines to teach in different ways, using the elements of their personalities and preferred ways of thinking and communicating they find most familiar. This prevents us from being in the position of saying: change everything you do. In psychotherapy and counseling, they used to say ‘you’re broken and I’ll fix you,’ whereas now they tend to say ‘you’ve got some really good coping skills already — let’s build on those.’

So let the storytellers tell stories and the evangelizers evangelize. Let the mystics inspire awe and the holy fools laughter.

Each teacher can be a very good teacher of a certain kind, and thirteen masks is too many — and also, alas, too few.

Thanks to Vida Maralani, Douglas McKee, and Edward Kairiss for their encouragement.