SoapBox: Top five tips for (new) teachers
Michael Nelson (and Mim) of liveandletlearn.net shares his top five tips for new teachers from the Blue Mountains in the Australian state of New South Wales.
Take note though, these tips are relevant to ALL teachers!
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Top Five Tips for New Teachers
What would be the most important tip that you would give a new teacher? You might be a student who has experienced plenty of classrooms over the years, both good and bad, or a teacher who has got lots of experience teaching students over twenty years or something, but what advice would you give to a new teacher? What would be your number one tip?
My name is Michael Nelson. I teach at TAFE up in the Blue Mountains in Sydney, Australia. My website address is liveandletlearn.net. I am going to take a few minutes to outline my own top five tips, the five most important things that I would recommend a new teacher take on board, not because I have got loads of experience myself, I don’t, but because I want to be part of a conversation. You know, I am keen to hear and interact with other people’s top tips for teaching and have other people interact with mine. So, for what it is worth, the first and most important tip that I would give a new teacher is to model learning to your learners, not teaching.
That probably seems incredibly obvious, but for some reason modelling the process of learning itself isn’t something that we teachers always do. I think tragically sometimes the reason that we stop modelling learning, in our professional area, is related to the fact that we have become a teacher in that area. Sure, there might be times to assume the ‘sage on the stage’ teacher role, but under normal circumstances the most valuable things that our learners can learn from us are the strategies and the processes that we use to learn and solve unknown problems in our own professional area. I am not suggesting, you know, that we kind of organise our own ‘how to learn’ workshops or that we invite students to get around our desks and witness the problem solving ‘genius’ in action, but just to model our own learning process at every opportunity, by inviting our learners to get involved or even contribute to our own professional learning, just as we do theirs.
Just to give a pretty obvious example that we have probably all come across. Imagine you have got a student who says “My style sheet is not working, I’m stuck”. Sure we can probably look at the style sheet and point out the error straight away, “Look you have got a typo right there” and we might feel great about ourselves “Gee aren’t I smart?” But we have just robbed the student of an opportunity to see the process that they should be learning to be able to solve those problems. Instead we could say “Okay, the first thing we need to check is what? That’s right, that the style sheet is correctly linked to the document. What is an easy way to do that? Great! I didn’t even have to do anything. Give it a go and I will come back in a minute and see how you go”.
As an educator I reckon it is criminal to hide our own learning process from learners. We are hiding one of the most valuable things that we can offer our students and why do we do it? Because it makes us teachers feel smarter than our students? Because it helps us to feel that we do in fact have something to contribute? Kathy Sierra, in her own top tips for teachers, puts it bluntly with tip seven where she says, “Leave your ego at the door, this is not about you”. During an email discussion last year Stephen Downes expressed clearly what it means to model learning, to conduct genuine teaching. He said, “Teaching as presenting is dead, teaching as transferring information from one brain into another is dead. Teaching as exercising authority over a group of students is dead, but teaching, genuine teaching, living what it is that you want the next generation to see and emulate is necessary. It takes a conscious effort to be the sort of person you are trying to get your students to be”. Given that we want our students to be learners in our specific professional areas, my number one tip for a new teacher is “Don’t stop learning when you become a teacher”.
Instead become even more passionate about your own learning and your professional area. Be infectious about it, be open and transparent about it, modelling your learning processes at every opportunity. Involve your learners in your own learning and problem solving processes by default and teach as the exception where required.
The second tip that I’d give is to act on the needs of our learners. Unless you are teaching four unit physics to a same gender class in a pre-millennial, six day Baptist school, you are guaranteed to have a bunch of very different learners, each with very different background knowledge, different learning styles, social skills, time management skills, life situations, cultural backgrounds etc. etc. One of the hardest lessons I am learning as a new teacher is that it is not as simple as catering for a few different types of learners such as the I think rather dubious categories of visual auditory and kinaesthetic. Each individual is very individual. We can run as many surveys as we like to appreciate all the differences, but ultimately we need to listen to each individual and not just with our ears.
We need to get to know each individual and then most importantly, to have any integrity with our learners at all, we need to act on the needs of our learners. For what it is worth listening to the ranging needs of learners over the past few years that I have been teaching and trying to meet those needs has led to the following action priorities for me as a professional educator of Information Technology.
Number One, find out what drives each individual, what are they passionate about? and wherever possible integrate each learner’s passions with their learning activities and assignments. Second, understand each individual’s range of current skills in the topic area as well as the rate at which they best learn and then find ways to allow individuals to learn at a level and pace that suits their needs. Thirdly, learn each individual’s confidence levels and frustration thresholds. How far from their current skills can their learning goals be set and how long can they be left to solve a problem before you need to step in to avoid excessive frustration? Use this knowledge to negotiate learning goals within each learner’s ‘zone of proximal development’ (Vygotsky 1978), monitoring their confidence and frustration levels closely. Fourth, to use a variety of different methods to facilitate learning within each group such as group work, hands on activities, watching a demo, listening to you talk (maybe?), group games, figuring it out on their own, project work, etc. you know, the list goes on. Try to listen and evaluate constantly which activities are helpful to which learners and lastly and probably most importantly, extend the learning beyond the classroom. Some students get their best learning done at 11.30 at night, weekends or holidays even. Providing support mechanisms for this via email groups and other technologies can help learners get help when they need it, as well as encourage a learning community.
In short, I don’t reckon there are any shortcuts to understanding the needs of our learners. We need to get to know the individuals themselves and when we do hear their needs we need to act on them however we are able to. Those five points are just an example of some of the actions that I have taken to respond to the more common needs of learners over the past few years in my classes, but I would love to hear how you act on the needs of your learners or as a learner yourself. What are your greatest needs? Following on from that, one of the most recurring needs that I have found is the need for relevant, practical and progressive activities that enable learners to learn through doing. They need to be relevant, not in the sense that your activity meets the criteria of a Training Package – although that’s important too – but in the sense that your activity is immediately useful to the learner who is genuinely interested in the topic, where they would feel ”Hey I could use this on the next site that I create”.
In an ideal world official Training Packages would reflect the real world skills that are relevant right now, but unfortunately that is not always the case. Again I think it was Kathy Sierra who said “If you have to explain to your participants why some activity is relevant then your activity is probably not relevant enough”. In terms of being practical I don’t think that takes much explanation. Just make sure that the learner gets to learn the process by doing the process. The biggest danger here is learner frustration so be ready to intervene if necessary. You might scaffold the activity through a variety of demonstrations, quizzes, games or other group activities, but remember that these activities are only the scaffold to help learners do the process themselves and lastly progressive in the sense that learners can progress through activities, always building on the skills of the previous activity as they spiral outwards at a pace that suits their needs.
The fourth tip that I give is to become a filter of relevant content for your learners. The previous tip was all about creating relevant and practical activities to learn through doing and this is where the bulk of my preparation time is spent. But note that these are practical learning activities, not learning content. These days I hardly ever create learning content for my classes, but I do spend lots of time filtering content for students. If your teaching or learning area is anything like mine – Information Technology and Web Design in particular – you will have a myriad of excellent learning content being created for you as you sleep by working professionals and companies promoting their products. There is virtually no need for me to create content for our classes. There is better material written by more qualified professionals being published daily out there on the Web. That said, given the vastness of the Internet, new learners will not always have the skills to find, filter and process these excellent resources, let alone find them in a sensible order to learn them, which is why I reckon it is the teacher’s role to filter, evaluate and structure these materials for new learners. But to be able to do that we teachers need to be keeping current ourselves, reading the latest professional articles or blog posts, evaluating new tutorials for relevance and quality etc.
Learning to find and filter information has always been useful for our own professional development as well as for modelling our own learning to our students, but the point here is that being skilled at filtering relevant content for individuals has become even more essential with the proliferation of available content on the Internet, both good and bad. One of the best things about working on your filtering skills is that as your skills improve and you connect with more and more relevant professional blogs and articles, you will find that without realising it, you have yourself become absorbed in learning, rather than content creation. And lastly, the fifth and final tip that I would give to a new teacher is to gradually hand over control of learning.
In our particular Web Design course we have got lots of learners who attend full time, a handful who attend two days per week depending on their availability, a mum of two who can only attend one day per week and others whose attendance is unpredictable for health and family reasons or whatever it might be. Some learners start with excellent technical skills, others are learning basic computing skills as part of the course and some just need more time to digest certain concepts. We want to support anyone who is keen to learn. When you find yourself with such a variety of learners – and I am sure that everyone working in public education will – if you teach this class in the traditional sense I reckon you can expect around 15 to 20 per cent of your class to be able to keep up with your delivery of the content. The rest will either be bored or frustrated and lose motivation. So what do you do? Set up ‘flexible delivery’ options?
I sometimes cringe at the term because it can be used to mean ‘no preparation necessary’. The danger there is that even if you have the best ‘individualised-e-learning-interactive-Web 2.0-insert your own jargon’ solution in the world, people can easily become socially isolated in the class and lose their motivation for turning up. Sure, there is the 10 to 15 per cent of your class who are highly motivated and would have learned the skills anyway had you just shut them up into a closed room with an Internet connection for six months and come through fine, but the rest ??? So what do you do?
How do you:
1. meet the individual needs of such a diverse bunch of learners?
2. provide a social learning environment where people see the inherent benefit of turning up to learn together? and
3. assess individuals in their mix of individual and group learning in a fair, valid and importantly, sustainable, way?
I wish I knew a complete answer or had a system which would do all this. All I can do is reflect on the successes and failures of the things that we have tried. The biggest success in my opinion has been gradually handing over control for individual learning and assessment to the learners themselves, enabling us facilitators to focus on:
1. providing social, relevant, engaging learning experiences that consider diverse range of skills and knowledge while at the same time
2. supporting or coaching learners in their individual learning and assessment skills such as goal setting, evidence collection and evaluation etc.
In fact I reckon this second point is more important than the content itself. As an example of this gradual handing over of control when a new bunch of learners for our Web Design class begin, we initially provide them with some limited control over the learning activities they begin with. Too much choice early on can be overwhelming. As the learners progress and begin demonstrating skills, we begin the process of coaching our learners in how they can match their activities against the official national competencies that they need to demonstrate, which is probably the hardest task to learn. The aim is to nurture the learning skills of our learners so that they can:
1. understand exactly what they are expected to be able to do for each unit of competency and therefore hold the facilitators accountable to some degree
2. that they be able to choose the resources and/or projects that they will use to learn the required skills, including classroom activities provided by a facilitator
3. that they plan milestones and execute their own learning
4. that they gather and record evidence of their skills as they learn; that they demonstrate the required skills using a combination of their own projects and relevant assessment items where necessary; but most importantly that they begin a lifelong process of learning to plan, manage, assess and evaluate their own learning goals.
For more details about how we have tried to achieve this and the obstacles that we have faced you can see a post called ‘A vision for learning in the 21st century’ on liveandletlearn.net. Gradually handing over control of the learning and assessment for individuals, in addition to the obvious benefit for the learner, allows us to focus more on providing fun, relevant, engaging activities that accommodate all levels of interaction and help nurture the all important social learning environment. For an example of a recent social learning activity we have tried see ‘Three Hour Full Code Press’ on liveandletlearn.net. Helping people learn is after all the main reason why we love working in education, right?
It needs to be said that some students, not many, but some, do not want to control their own learning. Often these are the same students who aren’t interested in learning how to do X. They just want to know “What do I need to hand in to pass?” Sometimes some of us have had unfortunate schooling experiences where we are drilled so hard in how to be dependent on one person standing up the front in front of us that we are not willing to let go of that control over our learning.
So there you have it, for what it is worth, my five top tips for new teachers:
1. model learning, not teaching
2. act on the needs of your learners
3. provide relevant and practical activities to learn through doing
4. become a filter, not creator, of relevant content for your learners and
5. gradually hand over control of learning to your learners
I hope it has been useful. Thanks for listening. Thanks to The Knowledge Tree for the opportunity and if you have got any feedback or even better if you have got your own top tips for teaching, post them, send them to The Knowledge Tree or send a link to me so we can share our experiences and learn from each other.
Useful links
Michael Nelson’s site - Live and Let Learn
http://liveandletlearn.net
Kathy Sierra’s blog - Creating Passionate Users
http://headrush.typepad.com/
Stephen Downes’ site - Stephen’s Web
http://www.downes.ca
Stephen Downes’ blog - OLDaily (Online Learning Daily)
http://www.downes.ca/news/OLDaily.htm
Vygotsky’s (1978) Zone of Proximal Development
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_development
Comments
4 Comments so far
My tips are: 1. Don’t take on too much (so many teachers are trying to make an impression and burning out). If you take your time, there’ll be plenty of it! 2. Respect your students. It shouldn’t be about power. Kids will not absorb your guidance well if they fear/hate you. You can be strong and strict but still be fair and kind. 3. Support your peers. Teaching is not about competition. Share your ideas and create a good working environment. 4. Ring parents when clssroom discipline isn’t enough. They are your biggest support if you approach it right. Remember they love their kids and want the best for them. 5. Enjoy your own subject and be prepared to go off track sometimes (but I don’t mean talk about your own children/personal life!!!)… do a ‘Dr Karl & Adam Spencer’ every now and then; that is, relate concepts to real life and let the kids ask questions. Gee it is hard to stick to 5!
A great article Michael and an interesting take on what matters for learners.
You’ve always inspired me with you ability to “quietly” work away bringing great ways of working forward in what for others is a dispiriting and tough environment. This quietness is for me the sign of a peaceful person with great strength.
I consider the attitude of leaving ego at the door, opening your own learning journey to your students and always considering the real aspects of engaging with people as an exemplary facette of who you are - Michael Nelson.
I’ve been disillusioned of late with the “connected web” and when I read articles like this it really inspires me to try harder and to build a better learning environment for those who I come in contact with.
Thanks for sharing your five tips and thank you for making it easier to see that it matters more to be humble….. rather than a constant humbug.
An interesting read Michael highlighting much of what we as educators aspire to, but I think many who aspire to meet these goals will go away disappointed. Many of our students expect, maybe even need that “sage on the stage.” I’ve been the “sage” and I facilitated years of self-paced flexible delivery. I think for many VET students the good stuff is somewhere between the two. In my 25 years in TAFE I have found our my students in Trades and for the past 8 years in teacher training enjoy social learning, they want to be told these are your readings, be here during these hours and this is what you will need to know. Many VET students are “field dependent” learners - they need this type of structure. Anyway my tips for new teachers.
1. Take yourself to the class - your “whole” self
2. Be animated - alive!
3. Develop well rounded session plans incorporating a variety of strategies to engage learners
4. Provide a “safe” learning environment
5. Ask good questions
6 Build relationships with your students - take an interest in them
There is a whole lot more, but it just comes down to good teaching practice and separating the “hype” from what a teacher can actually use in that classroom on Monday morning.
Karmen, your first point “Don’t take too much on” is a surprise - but so true. Interested to know the main reasons why (new) teachers take on too much, in your view? Hard to avoid sometimes!
Alex, thanks for the encouraging words! (But I’m afraid anyone who knows me will tell you that I don’t always leave my ego at the door
) And yeah, sometimes we can be too connected hey (is that what you mean?). I’ve been finding lately that to connect more with my class, I actually need to reduce my connections in other areas (online forums, email groups etc) as there’s just a limit there somewhere!
Ray, totally agree that many learners expect a sage-on-the-stage, and it’s certainly not fair to not cater for those expectations (whether they are helpful or not) - and there will always be a place for expert knowledge (whether from us or a student or an outsider).
My students know right from the start of our course that my aim is to make myself redundant, but it’s a gradual process through the course (and for many learners, not attainable in a year). I guess I see it as my role to continue building their (social) learning skills from the point where they are at (rather than expecting everyone to be able to learn independently from the word go.)
I love ‘be animated - alive!’ - for some of us (myself!) that is a skill that takes lots of practise! Sometimes I wonder whether my effort to be more animated and alive (and motivating etc.) in class is actually changing my personality…