Some Thoughts on Teaching
The two most influential teachers in the Western canon are arguably Jesus and Socrates. While some may point out that they were teaching different things, how they taught was similar. It is thus not surprising that they were both successful in crafting teachers from students.
As for myself, teaching is not all about parables and giving answers in the form of a question, but rather it is about turning every student into his or her own teacher. Ideally my goal as a teacher is to set clear standards, help students achieve such standards, and help students be more meta-cognitive about the nature of their study.
When it comes to language teaching, I believe it is always important to provide time for interaction, production, and feedback. For most people, passive learning is not learning. The same goes for content classes. We know more as a group than as individuals. However, as a group, we often make slower decisions and set mediocre goals. The responsibility of the teacher is to here provide leadership and organization so the set objectives can be met and knowledge efficiently spread. I do this by setting expectations and giving detailed assignments that will require independent research. This research is often shared with the class and connected to what is already known. Furthermore, I like to present the material as if we are all exploring it together.
I have a colleague who once basically said that one’s actions in the classroom are always a reflection of his or her teaching philosophy. In other words, one is only permitted to do what his or her teaching philosophy will allow. At the time, I disagreed over the extreme nature of this assessment and argued that a teaching philosophy was in nature something more ideal and thus never fully evident in the classroom. Perhaps, as with most things, the reality is a synthesis of the two positions. What I know for certain is that one cannot teach a child to swim by swimming to them. The teacher must be a little distant, stepping back a little farther with each success until the student swims and can teach others to swim. One could say that both Socrates and Jesus displayed a similar pattern.
