Today we did an activity where we were asked to brainstorm ideas about “what makes a good teacher”. Given everything that we’ve been learning over the past month as well as my own experiences with teaching and tutoring, I thought I had a pretty good idea about what makes a good teacher, and what my future students would be expecting of me. To me, a good teacher is someone who is observant/attentive to each student as an individual within the class, knowledgeable about what they are teaching, and passionate about what they do.
After jotting down all my ideas (in purple in the image below), I was passed two letters from middle school students who shared their take on “good teachers”. What did middle school students think a good teacher should do? I added their ideas to my brainstorming (in pink).
The answers I found from the two students were not completely unexpected, but looked for a slightly different set of skills than I did. In control, a good listener, someone who doesn’t pick favourites and someone who gives them enough time in class to work on their assignments.
After I’d worked through the first two letters I thought “well, they have some good points. But neither of them talked about having a teacher who was passionate, or knowledgeable, or entertaining. Surely those would come up in some of their letters, right? I switched letters with someone beside me, read through the new set, and added to my list. After doing this with 6-8 more letters, here’s what my brainstorm looked like:
At some point I wondered if I just had an anomalous subset of responses, and that eventually I’d find student responses to validate the points that I thought were most important. As I continued reading, I never did find students who focused on the points I was thinking of–they ended up validating each other’s points instead.
All in all this was a fruitful activity for me, as I gained some insight as to the differences between my perception of being a good teacher, and the perception many students have of who is a good teacher. Since I’ve started the program, I’ve often worried that middle school children are drastically more mature than elementary school children, and that I wouldn’t be able to use the approach to teaching that I have with younger children… Luckily, of the answers (like the no homework one) reminded me that middle school children ARE still children in some ways, and that maybe I’ve been overthinking things.
Building off of this activity, I think that some important questions to ask my students to answer is:
~What do you think makes a good teacher?
~Tell me about the classroom/your class
~Tell me about yourself (Anything you want me to know. You will remain anonymous unless you choose to write your name on the paper)