How to Teach

Teachers are by definition communicators. They have to quite often stand in front of a classroom, lecture, teach, give instruction. But does that mean all teachers are great communicators? Well, sadly, no. If you are a teacher, or if you aspire to be a teacher, I want you to step back a minute and think of the best teacher you remember from high school or college. Who inspired you the most? I dare say it wasn't somebody who just stood at the blackboard. If you're old enough to be a student when they had blackboards and wrote the most number of data points, it probably wasn't a teacher who used PowerPoint. By putting the most number of bullet points per screen and the most screens up per hour of lecture time. That's probably not what you remember. Chances are you remember the teachers who brought their subject to life through their passion, through their excitement, through their creativity, by bringing in real world examples, by relating to things that you already liked and knew about. Those are the best teachers I find, whether it's high school chemistry. You may have no interest in chemistry, but you may have had a great high school chemistry teacher who brought the experiments to life, made you care, and made the whole class interesting. It was just fun to go to the class. Now, I understand if you've got eight periods a day and 30 kids a class, it's just enough to keep up. You can't prepare a fascinating, new, brilliant lecture every day of the year for 60 minutes or 50 minutes and deliver it straight eight times a day. That's asking too much. But I do want you to think about how you can put a spotlight on the insights, the messages, the lessons you really care about the most. The ones that you want your students to remember, not just today, not just for the test next week, but that you want them to take, take with them the next year, the next year, maybe even a lifetime. How can you bring that to life? Teaching is a different form of communication because you have a different relationship with the audience. It's the only relationship where you have a lot more power over your audience, at least some of the time, because you have the power to test them, give them good grades, or to flunk them so you can give more data, you can dump more data. Although good teachers still spend the time to give examples, tell stories, put the data into context to make it understandable and interesting for the audience. Part of it is just stagecraft and showmanship. You don't have to stand in one spot as a teacher. There's nothing preventing you from walking around the room. Sometimes sitting, sometimes standing, sometimes having a little higher burst of energy. Sometimes it's just being more unexpected in who you call. Every single student in your room knows you could call on them at any moment, and you're going to be disappointed if they can't answer, they're going to pay more attention. So there's so many aspects that great speakers use to make their keynotes better that that teachers can use as well. Don't tell yourself, well, I'm not a speaker. I'm just here teaching. I'm just going through the curriculum. Don't do that. Don't give yourself an out. You can be the best teacher your students have ever encountered.