I’ve become a very bad teacher recently and I’d like to figure out why.
Reflecting on what a bad teacher is, I’ve come up with the following ideas
- More interest in the material and the value of the material outside of the students’ interest
- Dismissal of student concerns as equaling in importance to the course material or events
- Inability to make easy, meaningful connections between course material and the sphere of student engagement (i.e. what’s on their minds)
- Inability to create meaningful assessment experiences for the students
All of these things are elements of bad teaching and being bad at teaching, but perhaps the bad teacher is someone who just disregards these and doesn’t worry about them popping up in their pedagogy.
The bad teacher might not be bad teaching, but bad teaching is still a problem.
What can be done?
Perhaps more attention to what students think and concern themselves with would be helpful. More supplemental material for the course would be good too, such as audio and video recordings that help support class time.
Trying to reconstruct narratives of the teacher’s first contact with the material to determine how it made an impact on them, then considering ways to make that same sort of connection today with the situation we face.
Distributing power over the course activities to the students in a major way without any intervention or refusal to accept what they propose.
Maybe these things will work. I might try to return to Neil Postman’s 4 declarative sentences and 30 questions rule for having a class – what that means is that is all you are allowed to say if you are the instructor.