Today, I present this week's teaching advice: Get to know your students.
A common and helpful advice on giving a presentation (for example, on scientific conferences) is to "know your audience". The same applies when teaching a class. What kind of students are attending your lecture? What is their motivation, expectation and background? Try to build a relationship with the students, ideally in the beginning of the semester. You may feel confident about the contents of the class after teaching it for several years, but you might need to adapt your teaching style every time because your audience changes every time.
Remember their names if the size of the class is not too large. Greet students on the hallway, they will appreciate it (you might be surprised how many instructors fail at this simple "task"). Have a chat with your students during the five-minutes break of your class.
Even small interactions with students can have a great impact in their lives (and, by the way, also in the teacher's life). Give your students the opportunity to share with you their interests, their knowledge and their goals.
Let's conclude this post with a short personal story. I will never forget my first tutorial as a teaching assistant for an introductory computer science class, when I myself was a sophomore (3rd semester) undergraduate student: During the first tutorial, I asked every participant (a total of ~ 20 students) to introduce themselves and talk about their motivation and expectation for studying computer science. In retrospect, this may have been a little awkward, but we had a great conversation and created a positive atmosphere for the upcoming tutorials. This had been a spontaneous decision, maybe because I was intimidated by my first teaching task, but eventually I was very glad that we had done this, and the positive reception given by the students still serves as a motivation for me as a teacher to continue having such conversations and creating relationships.
No comments:
Post a Comment