More from the LERN article, "Your Experience in Teaching."
•Listen to your inner voice about how you might teach. Try some of what at first sounds outrageous - you’ll likely be surprised at how successful a seemingly outrageous idea turns out to be.
•Take a risk. You’ll feel better; your students will enjoy it. Don’t worry that no one has tried the teaching approach you have in mind before, or you can’t find any research about it. Try it anyway. Your idea just might set a new direction for teaching adults.
•Most of the time don’t share your new idea about teaching with a fellow teacher until you’ve tried it with your students. You’ll too often hear, “Stay with what you know, it’s safer.”
•Watch what other people do — techniques speakers use to engage an audience, strategies discussion leaders employ to involve people and so on. Borrow the ideas and try them out in your classrooms.
•Accept failure as a stepping stone to success. Unless you fail occasionally, you aren’t trying anything new.
Experience can be a wonderful and important teacher, particularly if we learn how to reflect on and understand what we have experienced. But experience can also be a block to change because it imprints in our minds particular ways of doing things. As teachers of adults, we must learn to recognize when experience is a good and proper teacher, and when it blocks our learning.
No comments:
Post a Comment