I spent a lot of good years first learning and then getting caught up in the language of academia. I found myself wandering through monstrous diatribes about the completion agenda and outcomes and learning goals—all designed to teach me what makes a good teacher. Unfortunately, all any of it did was to remove me from personal instinct and teach me how to speak a language that is wholly foreign to students and in doing so, overlook the most important thing there is when it comes to teaching: learning.
My first time teaching I was thrown into a classroom full of honors students without any formal training. There was a class on teaching and I signed up for it the next day, but I learned as they learned, and I learned from them. Fortunately, I had an advantage in this situation. I’d been around teachers my entire life. My mother taught in a resource room for 20 yrs and I myself had the ultimate edge: I was a smart, thoroughly disengaged student for most of my learning life. Basically, I was one of them and as such I knew exactly how to reach them.
That situation ended with me loving the job of teaching and signing up for more and more of it. Eventually that took me to ASU and from there to a local community college that was focused on the classroom more than it was the rhetoric of education—at least for a while.
The moment you start to talk about accreditation and completion goals and large-scale programs, you stop talking about good teaching. IMHO, good teaching is exactly like good coaching—you build a gameplan around the talent you have as opposed to trying to force everyone in the room to do something you’ve done for so long that it has become second nature.
I recognize the world isn’t black and white and you cannot completely engage in one thing or the other. The reality of education is that teachers are expected to have their feet in both worlds, and professors get full time roles because of the stuff they do outside of the classroom—the stuff that makes the college look good and gets you noticed—as opposed to anything they do inside the classroom. In my own job and interviewing experience, we will spend 45 minutes or more asking questions about who these people are as ‘educators’ and about 20 minutes watching them actually teach. Until recently, we did the teaching part without even having students in the room. What sort of false construct is that?
This semester I’ve stepped back entirely from the administrative side of the academic world. I’ve given up on presenting work at conferences, chasing academic publishing credits and innovation awards, and even looking for recognition within the college. I’ve drilled down my focus to what works best in the classroom and discovered that when I peel away the sticky glue residue that is everything that comes with the job of being a professor, the stuff beneath is raw energy that needs to be engaged and channeled. The human brain wants to learn and if we allow ourselves, each person standing up in front of that classroom has the engrained tools to engage it.