I have been attending a training class for my new job over the past few days and my trainer leaves more than a little to be desired. She is nice enough and pleasant to interact with on a personal level but, in my opinion, she possess few of the qualities of an effective teacher. This wouldn't be that much of an issue because the class is followed by a week of on the job training but there is a test that comes between these two periods of learning and failing it would mean the end of my employment. Because the other students and I are not receiving adequate instruction, none of us feels particularly confident when we are called upon to answer questions. We sit with our eyes turned down and hope that someone else chimes in with the correct answer. We behave like bad students but is this our fault? I, personally, have have no problem admitting my own shortcomings. I am chubby and I have an indulgent personality that I have made no real effort to change, for example. However, I can't help but to lay some of the blame for our less than impressive scholastic performance at the door of our instructor. We are all enthusiastic new employees, we all want to advance in our careers, and we all seem capable of doing so but we aren't being given the tools that we need to succeed. I am led to believe that, in our case, the bad pupils are the product of a bad teacher.
An instructor must instruct in order for his or her students to be able to meet his or her expectations. That seems like a simple enough concept but it is one that not everyone who is charged with facilitating the learning of others has grasped. "What did he do wrong," she asks while a member of our class stands before us, being expected to correct a mistake that he did not realize he had made. We sit in silence because we are not aware of the mistake either. No explanation of the question is given (until well after it would have done us any good) and we continuing bumbling through the mock interaction. That method of instruction imparts no knowledge on the trainees, it does not prepare them for the tasks that lay ahead of them, and the belittling tone that it carries suppresses their desire to participate in future classroom activities. In short it's a bad teaching technique and it demotivates good students.
Reading aloud can be a great way to relay information but it needs to be supplemented with actual lectures and by addressing inquiries as the arise. Our teacher will read exactly what is written in the book for hours and if someone stops her to ask a question, she seems annoyed as though it is a road block, standing in the way of her forward progress. Again, this discourages participation in the class which is an essential part of the learning process (in my opinion, anyway). Stifling curiosity also makes the pupil worse at his or her task because it allows opaque concepts to remain unclear in his or her mind which defeats the purpose of becoming educated in the first place.
I framed this topic within my own recent experiences but I have also see this same type of failing with educators within every institution of which I have been a part and that hints at a larger problem than my current frustrations. People who possess knowledge are assumed to be capable of transferring it to others but that is not always the case. Teaching in the context of a school, a training class, or anything else is as much of a social exercise as it is a technical one. In addition to knowing a subject, a teacher needs to understand how people communicate, how to speak in a way that is clear to someone without his or her experience and frame of reference, and how to listen for the needs of their students. I don't know if one could test for those skills in prospective educators but if they were strictly required, I think that we would have far fewer bad students in this world.
Peace.
All the images in this post are sourced from the free image website unsplash.com.