Different Voices of Teaching
Since everybody is different from each other, their voices of teaching also different. People’s approach, character, abilities, and perspective lead to creating their own style of teaching and “teaching voice” such as learning.
When I was reading Sarah Deel’s “Finding My Teaching Voice”, she was saying: “I had tried adopting the teaching styles of the good teachers I remembered, and it had not been an improvement, for me or the students.”. That is an absolute truth. As there is not a single truth for being the best teacher, we should create our own voice rather than adopt from someone else’s.
Describing our teaching style is not as easy for sure, especially without teaching experience like me. Because teaching is a totally different type of communication than our everyday interaction with people and there should be some strategies which we can maintain and adapt to our style easily. For example, creating common rubric for a course might be difficult to provide a fair environment for every student in the class. Because every person is different and everyone’s assessment criteria can be different as Deel mentioned. But maintaining and applying this is one of the hardest work as a teacher. I think, creating a common rubric, but also leave a gap for interpretation is a best way to evaluate because teachers are not computers and they are interacting with students to know their capabilities and their knowledge. So, teachers can assess all of the students’ works with a rubric, then evaluate individually again.
February 19, 2018 @ 8:36 pm
Thank you for your post! I completely agree, unfortunately there is no one size fits all for teaching. It’s great to have examples of good teaching styles but unfortunately I believe that we have to have some trial and error in order to find what works best for us. While this is a time consuming process, it’s one that I believe everyone must go through in order to find what works for them.
February 20, 2018 @ 1:13 am
Thanks for your post! I definitely agree that there is not a one size fits all when it comes to teaching, and it can be challenging to figure out your teaching style early on. I think as graduate students, we often have other teaching experiences even if we are not in front of a classroom. Grad students often teach and mentor other students in their lab, fill in for a class that their advisor teaches, teach a lab section of a class, etc. All of these experiences can be beneficial when figuring out your teaching voice. Thanks for the post!
February 20, 2018 @ 5:46 pm
Nice post Sevda. I agree with the idea that everybody is different, so there should be a number of different styles for teaching. But also I believe that we can pay attention to important activities and styles by good teachers, not just for mimicking them but for incorporating them in our style as well. Thanks.
February 21, 2018 @ 3:15 pm
Nice blog1 I like your point on “there is not a single truth for being the best teacher, we should create our own voice rather than adopt from someone else’s.” As you mentioned, assessing or interacting with all students in large classes(more than 50 students) is impossible, I agree the comprehensive rubric is a good idea, but I think the teacher must keep a record of the student’s performance during the semester and try to reach out student if he/she finds a low performance. I think every one of us will have our own teaching voice which may change from class to class and course to course.
February 21, 2018 @ 9:50 pm
Thank you for the blog! I agree with your comment that “creating a common rubric, but also leave a gap for interpretation”. I also think that this is a very good strategy to address the individual differences in learning. It might not be difficult to consider the differences in teaching, but back to assessment, how to find a balance spot between fairness and individual differences can be challenging.
September 26, 2018 @ 5:55 pm
I definitely don’t think there is any right way to teach. So the idea of just copying and pasting a teaching technique used by another successful teacher won’t necessarily work. It is much more difficult to craft your own teaching style, but hopefully it will be worth it to have a style that really works for you!