In my many years of schooling, I have been a pupil of various different teachers. I have also spent some time observing educators do their job. It is interesting to see such a wide range of personalities and teaching styles. It seems to me, that those who truly love their job tend to be much more effective teachers. As a future teacher hopeful, I came into college with the mindset of an educator. I knew from the very beginning that I lacked the support of my father, because he did not want me to be a teacher. He expressed that this career choice was a joke and it will leave me broke and in debt. That is exactly the kind of mindset that a teacher should not have. If someone picks a career in teaching for the money, they are in the wrong field. I therefore entered college with a goal to closely observe my professors and try to learn from them and their teaching styles; what I like and what I do not like. It was from there that I became interested in the teaching style of a particular professor, whom for the purposes of this article, I will call Dr. A (anonymously).
I have taken many classes with this professor over the last 3 years. One of the first things that I noticed about her teaching methods was that she rarely uses PowerPoint or projections. At first, as a student used to lectures with presentations and slides, I thought this was a terrible teaching method. Students have a wide variety of competency when it comes to note taking. For students who are good note takers, they usually have no trouble getting what they need out of a lecture and writing down important information. For those who struggle with this, lecture slides help guide their note taking. I started to realize in other classes, however, that the more effort I put into copying down each slide word for word, the less verbal information I retained. Christof Wecker, of Germany, wrote an article entitled Slide presentations as speech suppressors: When and why learners miss oral information, in which he studied the effectiveness of using PowerPoint or presentations while lecturing and teaching. Wecker concluded that slides do in fact hinder students’ ability to retain information that is given orally. He conducted a study in a classroom and realized that “in the presence of slides, [students] missed what was only said but not shown in written form on a slide.”
Teaching without using presentation slides (or using them as little as possible), Dr. A reduced the lack of focus that her students would have had if she did use them. As I began taking more classes with her, I began to care less about the absence of slides and more about the content of her lectures. At the time, I did not realize how effective this method was, but after asking seven of my classmates and discovering that all of us received an A or B in her class, I realized this method worked. She would often use the chalkboard and write out important thoughts and ideas; both her thoughts and our thoughts. This triggered student participation in the discussion. Everyone seemed to want to contribute to the conversation so she could acknowledge them by writing out their points on the board.
According to Macon State College psychologists in The Effect of Engagement and Perceived Course Value on Deep and Surface Learning Strategies, having and creating “more learner-centered and collaborative activities will enhance a student’s learning experience." Dr. A does just that. In every class I've had with her, she'll have days where the class splits into groups and does activities related to the content, or have group discussions based on literature we were assigned. This was a good way to break away from the same normative classroom behavior that we were all used to. After a while, sitting in class after class, going through the same structure can cause students to lose interest easily. Research says that “[moving] away from the traditional lecture-based pedagogy in favor of more active, learner-centered activities” makes learning more attractive to students. This is a concept I believe Dr. A focuses on. By incorporating activities and group work, she is able to engage the students in a new way of learning; peaking their interest in the content she taught.
Of course, Dr. A is not perfect. She may have her flaws, but all teachers and educators do. However, from what I observed, her positive aspects greatly outweigh the negative. Dr. A, although a positive figure and role model in general, seems to have an impact on minority students specifically. I have had her as a professor for three different classes, all of which had a small minority population. When comparing class participation from the beginning of the semester to that of the end of the semester, I noticed a huge increase in the participation of minority students, particularly black students. Dr. A is an African American woman who teaches English and literature. At the beginning of her class on the first day, she asked us to raise our hand if we'd ever had a black teacher before.It was astonishing to see that only two people raised their hand out of the sixteen people in class. I personally was someone who looked up to her as a role model, not only because she was an educator, but because she was a black educator.
Overall, I would say that Dr. A is a brilliant and effective teacher. She is not a perfect teacher, but no teacher is. She does a great job of including all of her students and making them feel welcome. She teaches her students not only the content required for her English course, but the skills appropriate and necessary for life. After having her and observing her for three consecutive semesters, I can conclude that as a teacher, I would like to model myself after her.
