In my very limited experience as a teacher, one of the most important things I have learned is that in teaching, there is no place or time for perfectionism. Teaching is a very messy albeit a very rewarding profession, that is all about the student. My two main attractions to this profession were the opportunity to work with children and youth, and to follow the footsteps of the great teachers I have had, who continue to be my role models, and give back to the community.
When I first thought of going into teaching, I had this idealistic notion that I am going to be able to make a difference in the lives of young people the way my teachers did for me; however, I have to admit that in my experience so far, my students have had more of an impact on me than I have on them. Since I began teaching, I have grown remarkably, and largely due to the vital feedback from my students. From them I learned how to better enable them to learn, as well as effective ways of letting them take charge of their learning, for example, with small group discussions and research tasks. This strengthened my belief that education is a life-long journey and we should all be active participants in our learning. From my students I also learned how to better pace my lessons, and how to better read the energy in the classroom. As I gained experience and confidence as a teacher, I learned that it was up to me to maintain and match this energy. I do not have it perfected yet, but I keep striving to employ strategies to optimize student learning and satisfaction in my classroom.
The common attributes of the teachers who stand out in my memory include their love and enthusiasm of the subject they were teaching, their patience and concern for student learning, and their ability to connect to the subject material to make it more relevant and accessible to all students. Not only have these role models influenced my practice, but they have also helped me define what I believe good teaching to be. What I consider my strength, as a teacher, is that I care a lot about my students and want them to be successful. To this end, I strive to make myself available inside and outside the classroom, and ensure that my students can have unrestricted access to me at all times possible. I try to address the individual needs of students in the classroom and acknowledge that each learner is different and unique. I accept diversity as the norm, but also admit that it is a challenge to be able to successfully reach out to every single student simultaneously – some need more support, while others need more of a challenge. And as I continue to grow and learn, I hope to become better at addressing this diversity in the classroom.
Rather than a talking head in the classroom, I prefer to view myself more like a guide or facilitator of learning. To achieve this aim, it is essential to create an atmosphere of safety in the classroom where students are willing to take risks and encouraged to play an active role in determining how they learn. I want my students to be curious, to ask questions, and to seek out the answers to those questions. I feel that this is vital in ensuring that my students acquire the independence and skills that will later help them to cope with progress and develop into the well-educated citizens of the world that I want them to become. In my experience, this has been a challenge that I am still working on.
An important step to achieve this goal, however, is by building personal contact with the students and letting them know that I am available to them for help and support as well as informal chats about their learning, or even life in general. Another small but significant aspect to achieving a safe and respectful environment is by modeling care and respect inside and outside the classroom. When students see that I care for them and everyone else around me, they are encouraged to relax and bring down their walls of inhibition. When they see that I respect and make an effort to ask after the well-being of other people out in the corridors, they learn to respect themselves and others around them, too.
When I first began teaching, I felt more pressure to spoon-feed information to my students, because I thought that if I do not explicitly address those concepts in the classroom myself, I cannot expect them to know it. That was a shortcoming I soon realized and corrected, because by doing so, I was underestimating their ability to learn and restricting their ability to inquire and discover for themselves. I have also learned that in teaching, the teacher and the students both have to be a little uncomfortable – it is out of our comfort zones where most of the learning occurs. As I strive to let go of control and make my lessons more student-centered, I see my students being more involved, more engaged, and more responsible for their learning. And the more I teach, the more I learn. Finally, I do believe that my goal for my students is for them to become well-educated, respectful, compassionate, and responsible members of the community and the world; but more than that, my goal for myself is to keep getting better than I ever thought I could be.
– Binal Khakharia