Do You Have What it Takes to be a Good Teacher?

As children follow their parents; students emulate their teachers!

“Every morning in Africa, a deer wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest deer, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the lion or a deer-when the sun comes up, you’d better be running!”

Konrad Lorenz coined the word imprinting while he was experimenting with goose birds. After birth, goslings just follow their mother everywhere. He calls this imprinting. In the same way, children and students follow their parents and teachers throughout their lives. They imprint on these people as well!

A new academic session is starting over. Almost every child will come with some expectations of doing well in this year. The child’s performance depends on the student as well as teachers. Let’s see how we can influence our students and prepare them for their life ahead.

How much influence do teachers have?

Some time ago I had a conversation with a few teachers’ friends about, “As a teacher, how much do we really influence our student’s lives & achievement?” The answer is quite surprising and it still stands tall.

In fact, in the lives of students, every teacher has a surprisingly high amount of influence. As teachers, we influence our students to the extent of making or breaking their life. As they spend the majority of their wakeful time of the day at the school, they build their life continuously with interactions, experiences, and perceptions.

As a teacher, we have great power to make a difference in the learning and the lives of your students. You can make a world of difference at the school level by working with your colleagues and administration!

To begin with, you can make an obvious difference in your classroom by your choice of teaching strategies. Ultimately, you can influence whether your students view themselves as learners or perceive that you expect them to succeed. THE POWER TO MOTIVATE, INSPIRE, AND SUPPORT STUDENTS IS YOURS ON A DAILY BASIS!

I certainly do not make the assumption that this work is easy. The most rewarding work is usually the most difficult. That’s why we are called as “nation builders”. Classroom teachers have tons of expectations placed on them by the administration, the education department the principal, parents/guardians, students and even from their own families.

When students enter our class with hope and big dreams, what can we do to help them to be successful?

Yes, it can all be broken down to the personal characteristics of individual teachers. But, we can do a few things to improve ourselves for our students. Many of us know that when a student admires you as a teacher, they tend to do well on your subject no matter how difficult it is. They get influenced by your personality and want to have some of your qualities in their own selves. Isn’t this just like imprinting?

How can a good teacher help a student?

1. Mitigating any fear students have of the unknown or of embarrassing themselves in the face of the unknown– Every learning experience is an encounter with the unknown. This includes making the learning environment “safe” to explore and fail, etc. Explicit learning contracts and the like can help here, as can the teacher not being afraid to make mistakes or reveal a lack of understanding in front of the students.
2. Creating experiences where students can get what Feynman calls “the kick of understanding” and Howard Gardner calls “crystallizing experiences“- This is that very rewarding feeling you get when you suddenly understand something, especially after working hard on it for a while. These experiences are important because they provide the constructive counterpart to the point about reducing anxiety. Even if students aren’t anxious or fearful of the unknown or of embarrassing themselves, they still need some positive incentive to engage with learning on their own and experience this intensely rewarding “kick of understanding” can make them want more of it. This means they will seek out learning opportunities spontaneously (like you want more ice cream after you have the first bite!)
3. They need specific skills to be effective learners- This refers to metacognitive skills, for example, such as knowing how to set appropriate learning goals, knowing how to formulate an appropriate learning strategy given the specifics of the learning challenge, testing the strategy, and revise it if it isn’t working well, knowing how to gauge whether you are making progress toward the learning goal and what moves to make if not, etc.

Do perceptions matter?

Even when individuals have little information about another, they naturally form perceptions about them, some of which might be based on stereotypes.

As research has shown, when teachers have high expectations, students are more likely to demonstrate high academic achievement. In contrast, when teachers have low expectations, students do not perform up to their potential. The table below lists some behaviors that might demonstrate either high or low expectation:-

High Influencing Teacher Low Influencing Teacher

1. Give longer wait time after asking a question

2. Provide more prompts and cues to shape student responses

3. Offer specific feedback

4. Create more opportunities to learn and practice new skills

5. Provide more positive reinforcement

1. Give little or no wait time

2. Move on to another student if a student gives an incorrect answer

3. Offer minimal feedback (e.g., “Incorrect,” “Wrong”)

4. Provide fewer opportunities to learn and practice new skills

5. Provide less reinforcement

What does research tell us?

In a study of teacher expectations, researchers randomly assigned students from disadvantaged backgrounds to either an experimental group or a control group, telling teachers that the experimental group of students had high potential. At the end of the study:

The “high-potential students” outperformed the control group. This has become known as the Pygmalion effect, a type of self-fulfilling prophecy. Even when students in the control group improved their performance, their teachers did not acknowledge or praise their increase in achievement. (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968).Students whose teachers have high expectations for them perform better on achievement tests than do students for whom teachers have low expectations. (McKown & Weinstein, 2008)

In short:

• Make it safe — and in fact set the expectation — that everyone will make lots of public mistakes as part of the natural learning process
• Give the students a taste of the rewarding “kick of understanding”/ “aha moments”/ eureka moments”.
• Teach them specific strategies — like Meta-cognitive strategies — that will enable them to be effective learners when the supports of a formal educational environment have been removed.

We may thus conclude by saying, “As a teacher, you must feel joyful working with students. If not, the misery/unhappiness would percolate down to students, and they would not enjoy attending your classes.”

Happy Teaching!

Originally published at blog.mindsolace.com on June 18, 2017.